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India Mandates Use of Open Source Software In Government
jrepin writes The Indian government announced a policy yesterday that makes it mandatory to use open-source software in building apps and services, in an effort to "ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs." The new policy (PDF) states that all government organizations must include a requirement for their software suppliers to consider open-source options when implementing e-governance applications and systems. The move will bring the Indian government in line with other countries including the US, UK and Germany that opt for open-source software over proprietary tools.
You mean software without the NSA 5-eyes backdoors?
Face it, who the f*** wants US made kit when they're talking about compulsory backdoors, and its clear there may be a lot of backdoors in their kit already present.
It's not just the intentional backdoors, US companies report their zero day vulnerabilities to the NSA, and they use them in things like Stuxnet, so even buying kit from decent careful closed-source US companies is a risk.
If they go ahead an eliminate encryption, then technically no business in the world will be able to use US made kit, because they'd be exposing their business secrets, their financials details, their confidential customer records, everything to everyone.
Yep, good points all around. The GPL does constrain the amount of people that fork a proprietary version. I've always been torn on the benefits of one or the other. The BSD license proponents would say that proprietary forking is a net benefit if it means more people are on a similar platform. I have noticed that FreeBSD is used quite a bit in proprietary realms, but it doesn't seem to detract from FreeBSD much. However there are great benefits to the share-alike idea the GPL promotes. I suppose if a project is already mature enough then copyleft vs copyright doesn't seem to matter as much.
"How many times has this happened"
MySQL is the obvious example, I think. It can happen with GPL, but it can only happen with the agreement of all the copyright holders, which is, in practice, unlikely. So, for instance, the linux kernel is unlikely to ever be released under any license other than GPL because there are so many copyright holders. Projects with a single copyright holder, usually through a copyright assignment policy could be relicensed.