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India Eyeing Its Own Open Source Licence
Guru Goo writes "Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology,Mumbai has begun an effort to create an open-source license that will let programmers share ideas while also letting them retain the rights to their own software modifications.The license will likely function much like the Berkeley Software Distribution or the
MIT License programs, he added. The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed. But Phatak's proposal comes with the power of numbers. India's 1,750 colleges with computer science and electrical engineering degrees admit about 250,000 students a year. Combined with the outsourcing boom, that makes India one of the major centers for software development.
While the collaboration between academia and industry in india is not as pervasive as in the U.S., it is growing."
The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed.
Why don't they just pick one? How does entering another license into the fray solve the problem with there being too many?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Is this proof that the US legal risk is actually putting extra burden on US-based institutions (including corporations and universities)????
They already have an Out Sourcing license.
A recent visitor to Phatak's office was Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie. "I told him a competitive price point (for a desktop OS) would be in the single digit dollars," Phatak said.
Would that digit have been 0 by any chance?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
having a license that are splitted into sections?
this program follows "free use" and "free distribute" section of abc license
this way, there can be ONE license and everyone can taylor a license of their needs from sections of the license
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
and harmoniously."
/.er...
"Dr. Phatak's dream is to see a resurgent India catching up with the world using Information Technology as the spring board. He hopes to make IT work for the millions of Indians so as to enable them to lead an honorable, comfortable and peaceful life full of love and harmony."
But best of all, under P^2's 'hobbies':
" Giving unsolicited advice to unsuspecting individuals and groups."
He's a natural
The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed
Is there an "Open Source license-picking wizard" anywhere?
Remember the old mainframe(?) "animals" game in which you pick an animal, and it would keep asking you questions to differentiate between two types, until it guessed your animal, or didn't have your animal in it's list? (actually it was a binary tree)
We could use one of those. It keeps asking us questions, one at a time, until there is only one license that matches our selections. Any new license can be added to the tree at any time by creating a question that differentiates it from the license you would otherwise get by answering the questions for it.
- bp
bp
The LGPL has been especially created to be used in commercial programs where the source could not be given but a library could be used externally (by using headers and libs files only).
Actually in a way, I rather envy these up and coming third world states as they begin to make their presence felt. They have few advantages in the global economy, but its like the Russians; they had the best mathemeticians in the world because all you needed to learn it was a pen and paper. Well all you need to learn software, graphic design, or any of the many related fields is a computer, and they are getting cheaper by the week.
These countries have a chance to learn from the mistakes made by the western world (in particular America and its crippling IP laws), so I wouldn't call it a process of catching up, more a process of cherry picking the best ideas and choosing their own divergent path.
I expect the next large IT advances to come from places like India - once it becomes obvious to them that they have a clear run at parity, with much more advanced nations, they will invest many more of their resources into it. In fact, unhindered by IP law, they may well become vastly superior in terms of IT.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.
- This is not a massively-funded government project. It's one person trying to design a license agreeement, for God's sake. Anyone can do that without implying a nuclear-weapon-like government strategic program. If a professor in, say, OSU was to design a new license, would Slashdot run a story saying "America designing its own Open Source license"?
- I know Phatak. He's a good teacher, but tends to like thinking up grand visions, and sees himself as some kind of leading light carrying India to leadership and glory in the tech world. Not many people other than him see him that way. No reasonable journalist would report his statements/plans as representing what 'India' is doing.
Nothing like compiling your free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer software with an IPA.
Er, um, doesn't the GPL already do this??? You don't have the rights to -- say -- close-source the entire code, but you can do whatever you want with your own code.
If, on the other hand, he wants to go with a berkely-style license, then please go with the berkeley style. I'm one of those who believes that we already have enough licenses. I'm wondering if Phatak fully understands the licenses that are already out there?
If what he wants is a "look but don't touch" license (a'la some of MS's 'shared source" initiatives) then I'd be inclined to say "thanks but no thanks".
Perhaps the OSI should require people who want to propose yet another Open Source license to show cause why the new license provides something valuable beyond the already existing set.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...licensing program that will let programmers share ideas with one another while at the same time allowing them to retain the rights to their own software modifications.
/. minions as to why and how.
<rant>
You mean just like almost every other OSI-certified license? Hey, I wrote this code that is a modification to X. I am licensing under license Y. But guess what! I still own my code. I still hold the copyright. Unless you're working with someone who requires any contributions to their code have copyright assigned back to them, you always retain your rights to do whatever you damn well please with your code. All the license does is give other people the same rights I have with some (more or less) restrictions that I, as owner of the code, don't have to follow.
Like, say, there's this project that is dual-licensed under the GPL gratis and a proprietary/closed-source license for a fee...then I can write this additional module of functionality that tacks onto it. I, as owner of the code, can then decide to keep it to myself and not worry about the GPL (because it only kicks in if I distribute), or I can choose to release my code under the GPL (which does not give the project "principle" the right to include it in the proprietary/closed-source license) OR I can do exactly what the other folks are doing: release my modifications gratis (or for a fee if I want to...not that I'd collect much from anybody because the first person who paid could turn around and release it gratis) under the GPL and license it back to the project principle under the proprietary/closed-source license gratis or for a fee if I so choose.
I have all these options because I retain my rights to the code I write, period.
Now, what it strikes me as this guy wants to make something somewhere between the GPL and BSD licenses. A little less scary to PHBs (see: GPL) and a little less scary to developers who believe in "share and share a like" (see: BSD). I just don't know enough about the myriad of other licenses out there to know if something like that already exists...although I suspect it does.
</rant>
Of course, I'm probably way off base and will be undoubtedly regaled by many of the
Except it says "sir" and "humbly" a lot more.
You are in a maze of twisty little licenses, all subtly different.
Chip H.
Depending upon the way you pronounce it, "phatak" could mean boom or gate.
If pronunciation is "phutaak", meaning is boom,
if pron. is "phaatuck", meaning is gate.
Here, literally, Phatak means "Gate", typically attached to fence. Deepak means "Lamp". Given these, it could be your gateway to illumination.
No thats no correct. Bombay was renamed to mumbai around 7 years ago. Mumbai IS NOT the english translation for bombay.
Great... all we need is even *more* confusion. It's already hard enough to try to figure out if you're going to get a mob of angry nerds with torches and PDAs storming your doors... it's only going to get worse.
Its obviously a stupid idea to create another license just so contributors can keep their modifications. They already can do that! And it doesn't matter that India has 250,000 students (of which how many are writing any open source code that matters?), because if the students understand open source, and if the teachers do, they can still and probably will still release their software under GPL or BSD.
Thats the beautiful thing about open source, just as the community must maintain code for the code to thrive, the community must maintain the license as well. So just because some blowhard gets it in their head that no existing license could address their specific problem, and thus they need to create a new one, the community doesn't have to use their license. Thats even if OSI decides to certify it.
This is why I love open source so much. The community will solve this issue, it will weed these losers out. No congressional act needed, no changing of the rules, it didn't even take me wasting 15 minutes of work time to type it up. This is how it should be done.
Matter of fact, the more I think about this story, the less it matters. I'm going back to work.
http://www.haxwell.org
One of the things that many people fail to mention. India is indeed pumping out these vast quantities of highly qualified people. The down side is that even if the industry grows at a massive rate and outsourcing continues there is no way that the world economy can sustain these new people joining the market every month. There is very little written about that aspect of the indian graduates.
D &to=INR&amt=1&t=2y
One of the issues that has increased the speed of out sourcing is that the indian rupee has dropped significantly against the US dollar in recent years. When it starts to rise again the cost of outsourcing and employing people in india will increase that could have both possitive and negative aspects on the sectors in question.
Indian Currency here : http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=US
GPL is the hobby and leisure of rich people who can afford to be charitable - after all RMS gets paid more for 1 talk than 1 Indian programmer makes all year and needs to feed a family of 4/6. RMS can get a roof over his head anyday even if he doesn't make money. Poor old Rajeev from Bombay stands in the rain if he's not paid for his programming skills (India doesn't have any safety nets for unemployed people).
Going BSD gives India a way to get a leg up on Western programmers. India doesn't have to share its IP with China or any other up and coming offshore programming outfit and shit that's the ONLY thing India got going.
None of them seem to have a clue that a world exists outside of their campuses, and that world if full of greedy capitalists.
The beauty of the GPL as opposed to BSD or MIT schemes is that it uses existing copyright laws to ensure that programmers can actually be recognized properly for the code they create.
This means a lot more than having the respect of your peers. It means being able to feed your family.
Of course, GPL won't enable you to make money in and of itself, but it prevents others from directly exploiting you. You hear a lot of whining about loss of freedom in today's world, but I will truely be frightened the day a GPL case is lost in a Supreme Court somewhere. It's that important.
Open Source ideas outside of the GPL are not practical if you lack the massive finacial support of an institution. They do have their place though, I guess.
In this thread, CNet is spinning the topic to focus on the open source movement, not the free software movement. There are differences between the movements and, while members of them work together in practical projects, the two movements are quite different philosophically. One of those differences has to do with discussing freedoms at all (the open source movement was designed not to discuss freedom, but the free software movement focuses on it) and another difference in practice concerns the preservation of freedoms in derivative works (the open source movement makes no difference between what the free software movement calls "copylefted" and "non-copylefted" licenses).
Please do cite where you would get this misinformation, because it has never been true and for a very good reason: "choice" is a way to railroad someone into losing their freedom. The free software movement is about giving all computer users the freedom to share and modify computer software. Choice is an argument that might appear to tend toward that end, but is actually quite different.
Some time ago, three graphical web browsers were the most popular web browsers around: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera. Since there are at least two browsers in the set, choice is satisified. But software freedom is not satisfied at all because all of those browsers are proprietary software; none of these programs give you all of the freedoms of free software.
Today, Firefox is increasingly popular, but it is being pitched by the Mozilla Foundation on this weaker argument of "choice". Software freedom is a better argument which goes unmentioned by the Mozilla Foundation because they choose to follow the open source movement. The advantage to them is that if they ever want to make Firefox into a non-free browser, they can do so without altering their argument on why one should choose Firefox. Free software advocates, however, would lose interest in Firefox if it became non-free.
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