India eyes own open-source license

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engineering degrees admit about 250,000 students a year, he said. That's up from 1983, when there were 70 colleges admitting 5,000 students a year.

Deepak Phatak

Combined with the boom in outsourcing, this makes India one of the major centers for software development.

A contest sponsored by Red Hat seeking new concepts for open-source software drew more than 2,000 proposals, Phatak said. Winners will be announced in a few weeks.

Phatak has also created the Ekalavya program to stimulate open-source ideas. Under the program (named after a Hindu legend), students submit ideas to a collaborative portal. Those with promising ideas are then linked up with mentors in the industry.

"Let me tell you my dream: Today, India is a net taker in the open-source community. In four years, I want the world to recognize India as a net giver, and that is entirely possible" he said.

While collaboration between universities and private enterprise is not as pervasive in India as it is in the U.S., it's growing, according to many sources. For instance, start-ups created to exploit technology that was developed at universities have begun to pop up, according to Rishi Navani, managing director at WestBridge Capital Partners, a venture firm specializing in Indo-U.S. investments. One example is Strand Genomics, which specializes in analytical software for drug discovery and development.

Professors at major institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology or the Indian Institute of Science also sit on technology advisory boards with corporations and government agencies, which are often run by their former students. ("The IIT is a big club," said one graduate.) Recently, a large insurance company adopted thin clients rather than PCs in part because an IIT study showed that it could cut ownership costs by about two-thirds, Phatak said.

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.

This Looks Very Much Like MS's Shared-Source Program!

From my view point as a Financial, Economic and Technical Analyst I often wonder why programmers would want to work for free - how do they get their "bills" paid? On the other hand if they die as the "Confucius" Philosophy tells us then they depart the world without anyone being able to benefit from their ideas which will be lost for ever. Question: Can't an acceptable equilibrium (balance) be found between the proponents of Proprietary Software and those of the Open-Source Communities. This newest open-source licensing program the "Knowledge Public License, or KPL" as it is called looks very similar to that of the Microsoft's Program where the company retains the rights to the program modifications. Come work for us for free!!!

;-)

[pcLoadLetter]

Off base

1. There are many open source programmers that get paid to write open source. The rest do it in their free time out of love for programming and/or belief in a project. That may be a hard concept for selfish types to understand.

2. Shared Source is a farce. As the article states: "The idea is to create an environment where developers can take advantage of the collaborative power of the open-source movement while giving individuals the ability to exploit their own twists."

Shared source does nothing like that, if fact does nothing at all.

[System Tyrant]

Question

If I use code covered by the BSD licence and put it in code covered by GPL does that then make the code covered by BSD now forced to use GPL or vice versa?

I am curious how using code from one licence effects it's use in another lincence.

[pcLoadLetter]

re

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

[YankeePoodle]

Linux and FreeBSD

I am not sure, but I have read an article, how Linux with GPL cannibaled FreeBSD with BSD license. You can copy stuff from FreeBSD to Linux and improve but you cant copy from Linux to improve FreeBSD, because GPL will impose itself onto FreeBSD (atleast part of the code), where any changes made to that particular part of code has to be given back to the community (unlike BSD where you need not make it public) and has to be released under GPL.

[Ajay Sravanapudi]

IITs influence on tech

Is huge in India and in the US. Look at any tech firm and you'll find it teeming with IIT alumni. For eg. Cisco has over 1000 alumni from IIT on their payroll. Most household name tech companies in the US have IITians at all levels of their orgs. A major event in May highlights the contributions and collaboration of IITians and the US and Indian economies. www.iit2005.org.

[YankeePoodle]

IIT hype...

I think the hype surrounding IITs is too much, IITians are really good at what they do.. but I have not seen more than handful of outstanding contributions to the feild of CS/IT from IITians.

[alx359]

close-source paradigm-shift in process

Software in general is fast becoming a canned commodity and close-source is steady losing market-share every year. Sooner than later, I'm sure MS is going to give Windows/Office away for free, as they're losing fast any reasonable advantage against their open-source counterparts.

When Windows will be pressed to reborn as sort of ?Winux?, MS will need to be ready to stop being a traditional software house but more a technology provider for pay-per-experience kind of services (e.g. gaming, gadgets).

Good profit for software development will still exist for custom-tailored projects (especially if attached to their own custom hardware if wish to sell to the masses) and also in some sorts of turn-key solution packages attractive to bigger corporations (as RedHat and the like are trying to do).

However, the revenue of individual developers or small teams is at stake, as cheaper jobs from eastern countries will make them easily redundant until some global balance is reached; they will need to find a niche where some relatively cheap utility will make its way to the heart of customers (e.g. 3D packages, text editors).

Open-source developers are getting a payed job as part of maintaining promising initiatives and in some type of strategic research or creative projects that encompass into a broader vision of their sponsors.

As more powerful the development tools (containing more and elaborated reusable patterns), it's completely reasonable the less unique added-value to reflect in lesser costs and license fees. Only real added-value and innovation deserves good money, but the inherent volatility of detached from hardware software applications requires this industry to start looking elsewhere to make long-term profits of simply writing code. Money is not already there anymore.

[Andrew J Glina]

Give it a rest

?Winux? will not happen until;

1. Linux is usable to the common joe... and...
2. Microsoft does not have 10 Billion+ in liquid assets.

I recently tried to shift my server to Linux but was supprised at the amount of text based configuring I needed to do to get Samba running. When it kept freezing doing stuff that Windows 2000 (here I go again) found easy to do (like copying files) I decided that I had better things to do and put back on Window 2000. I will try again in another few years. Linux is not ready to replace Windows any time soon. Look to Apple. They are the only group around at the moment that have a chance.

(Why did I even try? I wanted the ability to have more that 10 networked files open without buying Window Server.)

Ignorant

Yeah. That makes sense. You know, how it magically doesn't work for you, but Fortune 500 companies are hailing it... Gee, could it be that you don't have any clue what you're doing? Stop spouting ignorant tripe. You don't have any idea what you're doing, so look it up instead of crying about it.

LGPL

You want to use the code in proprietary software? But still require the source of the core components of the software to be shared, like the GPL? That sounds like what the article is talking about anyway. In such cases, the LGPL is a good fit. We don't need any new "open source" licenses. We have too many as it is. Use what is available, you'll find something that fits your needs.

india's map

Hi all:
I don't understand why the map of India is always shown incorrectly in the news.

The state of kashmir is not even shown here. This is quite disrespectful. Agreed that there are differences in opinions about the area that belongs to Pak and so forth, but that does not justify deleting the entire state from the map of India.

[santhoshash]

Indian flag looks incorrect

Hi,

I dont know how much its gonna make a difference for the content of this tech news, but when you create an image that is been viewed by millions of people, its not quite right.

The main thing is missing from the flag is the "ashoka chakra" that should be placed in the center.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=indian+flag&btnG=Search

Please correct this.

santhosh