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

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.