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."

Comments

what the?

[hostyle]

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?

Re:what the?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because none of the current licenses do what they want.

And here I though Free Software was about choice.

Re:what the?

[bcrowell]

First of all, that statement assumes that "too many" lisences is a "problem". I bet that many here would disagree
It is a problem. It's a problem if it makes it difficult or impossible to share code.

And second, a new lisence is created to meet requirements that existing lisences do not. That's the only problem that all new lisences solve.
Except that the article doesn't mention anything that they think is unsuitable about the present BSD-style license. It sounds to me more like a case of "me too."

Re:what the?

[Vellmont]

(The great thing about lisences is that there are so many to choose from!).


Choosing a license isn't like picking a flavor of ice-cream. Choose the wrong one and you could limit your potential to use others code in your software, limit the ability for others to use your code in there software, limit the usefullness of your software, limit its distribution, etc.

The problem with too many licenses is that the incompatibilites between them become more and more complicated. Who wants to understand the intracies of 15 different sofware licenses whenever you want to use someone elses code?

Is this so obvious to everyone else in the world?

[zanderredux]

According to Phatak:

"Legally, we have to move very carefully because the Americans have a tendency to sue anybody for anything,"

Is this proof that the US legal risk is actually putting extra burden on US-based institutions (including corporations and universities)????

That makes sense

[ninja_assault_kitten]

They already have an Out Sourcing license.

A fair and even price

[Timesprout]

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?

A license-picking wizard

[Black Perl]

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

Re:A license-picking wizard

[raider_red]

Sort of. The creative commons web site has something along those lines at this link

This article has very little to do with India

[Aryawhat]

... and more to do with poor journalism (CNET's and Slashdot's):

- 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.

Re:This article has very little to do with India

[donutello]

Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.

Knowing Phatak, though, I'm pretty sure he did nothing to dissuade the reporter from thinking he represented the entire country :-)

Re:This article has very little to do with India

[Sivaraj]

- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.

I completely agree. Besides, in India as is the case elsewhere GPL wound makes sense for most of the open source developers who do not what to see their work hijacked.

There may be a few specialized cases where GPL, BSD, MIT or IBM's public license do not meet the needs. These projects are going release under a different license like so many other projects and companies have done elsewhere.

Doesn't the GPL already do this?

[darkonc]

an open-source license that will let programmers share ideas while also letting them retain the rights to their own software modifications.

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.

Hey, I have a hot news flash for ya...

[killmenow]

...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.

<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 /. minions as to why and how.

It's just like the GPL

[DrXym]

Except it says "sir" and "humbly" a lot more.

Licensing maze

[chiph]

You are in a maze of twisty little licenses, all subtly different.

Chip H.

Re:Deepak Phatak?

[PaneerParantha]

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.

Re:Deepak Phatak?

[kaarigar]

Here, literally, Phatak means "Gate", typically attached to fence. Deepak means "Lamp". Given these, it could be your gateway to illumination.