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India Eyeing Its Own Open Source Licence 162

Posted by Zonk from the they're-everywhere! dept.
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."
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India Eyeing Its Own Open Source Licence More

India Eyeing Its Own Open Source Licence

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  • what the? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hostyle ( 773991 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:16AM (#12519381)

    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? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They're all written in English you insensitive clod!

    • Re:what the? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Because none of the current licenses do what they want.

      And here I though Free Software was about choice.
      • Exactly! The structure of government and educational institutions in India is much different than that in the US, so some changes would be in required for any of the US-style licenses to be effectively adopted by institutions in India.
        • I have talked to alot of India folks, and I seriously think they are only limited by their Caste System. Alot of the India folks say it's no longer an issue. But they're just not admitting it.

          Government and educational institutions still reserve slots for certain level of the caste systems. A super programmer in a lower caste system is not equal to a super programmer in a higher one. List goes on...

      • 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 [gnu.org] 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 preservati

    • "How does entering another license into the fray solve the problem with there being too many?"

      First of all, that statement assumes that "too many" lisences is a "problem". I bet that many here would disagree (The great thing about lisences is that there are so many to choose from!).

      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.

      • Re:what the? (Score:2, Funny)

        by vrt3 ( 62368 )
        The great thing about lisences is that there are so many to choose from!

        s/lisences/spelling standards/

      • Re:what the? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:39AM (#12519611) Homepage
        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? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nuggz ( 69912 )
          It is a problem. It's a problem if it makes it difficult or impossible to share code.

          Actually it's only a problem if the owner can't manage to let his code be used in the manner of his choosing.

          Licenses conflict because of two reasons.
          1. Unintentional conflicting requirements.
          2. Intentional restrictions on the use of the copyright owners work.

          #1 is a problem, with too many licenses.
          #2 is not

          If you wish to avoid #1, stick to a well known license.
          BSD, GPL, and closed source tend to cover the requirements
        • >>It is a problem. It's a problem if it makes it difficult or impossible to share code.

          It's even more of a problem if the license allows Microsoft to profit from your code by using it in windows. Stick with the GLP.

      • Re:what the? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:40AM (#12519629) Homepage

        (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?
      • If I want to leverage feature A from OSS license type X code and merge it with feature B from OSS license type Y code, there is a chance that X and Y may be mutually exclusive licensing terms.

        The more license types there are, the greater the likelyhood that licenses will come into conflict. And then, the only people that will benefit will be lawyers.
    • RTFA. They are not trying to reduce the number of existing licenses.

      These are the times I miss my mod points.

    • Why don't they just pick one?

      This is why I always recommend the GPL when possible. Some people have minor issues with it, but essentially, it's a good license, and it has more legal clout behind it than most of the others combined. The only other software license I would consider right now is the Afferro GPL, which covers use on websites.

      How does entering another license into the fray solve the problem with there being too many?

      You're right: there usually is none. I guess some people just feel

  • Is this so obvious to everyone else in the world? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zanderredux ( 564003 ) * on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:17AM (#12519390)
    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 answers my previous post; but still, why not use something like the apache license (which, correct me if I'm wrong, includes patent protection) or the CDDL?

    • Well, this is rather offtopic, but to partly answer to the subject question and JFTR: also here in Italy it's quite common to make jokes about the american "tendency to sue anybody for anything", which is tipically regarded as a bad faith way to make money from someone instead of a way to obtain legal equity.

      (Not that in Italy the justice system doesn't have its own problems, to be fair, especially regarding excessive duration of legal proceedings.)
    • As I understand it from a former collegue who had written several technical book, US copyright laws are ignored in India. He was forced to sell his books there at an almost non-existant profit, because if the didn't agree, they'd print them anyway and not pay him anything!

      So excuse me if I don't care about India's licensing schemes. They sure don't seem to care about ours!
      • US copyright laws are ignored in India. He was forced to sell his books there at an almost non-existant profit, because if the didn't agree, they'd print them anyway and not pay him anything!

        It's not like someone held a gun to his head. Would it hurt you to reveal who his (US) Publisher was? Most US and European publishers have published Eastern Economy Editions for ages, and these days pretty much everyone -- from O'Reilly, McGraw-Hill and Wiley to IDG and Sybex -- have their Indian subsidiaries which do
  • What need is it, exactly, that india requires that isn't met by the GNU or BSD licenses?

    What's next? AmericanNationalLicense? BritishNationalLicense?

    This can only be a bad thing.

  • That makes sense (Score:3, Funny)

    by ninja_assault_kitten ( 883141 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:19AM (#12519413)
    They already have an Out Sourcing license.

  • A fair and even price (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:19AM (#12519415)
    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?

  • what about (Score:2, Interesting)

    by coolcold ( 805170 )
    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
  • and harmoniously."

    "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 /.er...

    • 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 weste

  • A license-picking wizard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Black Perl ( 12686 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:33AM (#12519554)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by raider_red ( 156642 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:40AM (#12519619) Journal
      Sort of. The creative commons web site has something along those lines at this link [creativecommons.org]

      • Of course, theirs was a lot easy to develop than what grandparent poster is suggesting, since they wrote all of the licenses themselves specifically to match every possible combination of the variables they use.

        The GPL and, for example, a Microsoft EULA, are so different that you'd need an advanced degree in symbolic logic to come up with ways to categorize them like that.

        • The GPL and, for example, a Microsoft EULA, are so different that you'd need an advanced degree in symbolic logic to come up with ways to categorize them like that.

          That's the best argument for throwing them out and starting with something that can be understood by real humans.

    • Is there an "Open Source license-picking wizard" anywhere?

      Not really, but there are really only two (maybe three) sane choices (unless the project you are developing for uses a different license already, or you already know better):

      • MIT
      • GPL (maybe LGPL)

      Anything else risks your license being incompatible with large swaths of software (in the linking sense) and possible failing the DFSG. Moreover, using uncommon licenses means that you're more and more on your own for figuring out what they mean.

  • This article has very little to do with India (Score:5, Informative)

    by Aryawhat ( 706371 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:40AM (#12519626)
    ... 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.

  • IPA (Score:2, Funny)

    by glarvat ( 753298 )
    I vote for India Public Agreement.

    Nothing like compiling your free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer software with an IPA.

    • bah (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )
      If you're still compiling after your second IPA, it's just a regular pale ale . . .

      :)

      hawk

  • 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.

    • 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

      I think you just made his point on why he wants a license other than the GPL. You can do whatever you want..except close the source..that doesn't sounds like whatever I want, which is a good reason to pick another licensing model.

      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 i
      • You retain the rights to the code you have written, including releasing it again with or without modifications as a closed-source program (cf Qt). If you have released this program under a licence that opens up the source, you cannot withdraw that program from being under that licence unless you have a proviso permitting just that somewhere in the licence agreement. Such provisions in a licence are likely to make would-be users view it suspiciously, so I have a hard job believing a licence along those lines
        • If you have released this program under a licence that opens up the source, you cannot withdraw that program from being under that licence unless you have a proviso permitting just that somewhere in the licence agreement.

          You can't remove the license for the copies of the code that are 'out in the wild', but you have every right to release a copy of your own code under any other license you want (including the Microsoft EULA, presuming that it's legal).

  • Hey, I have a hot news flash for ya... (Score:4, Informative)

    by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:45AM (#12519674)
    ...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.
    • "Now, what it strikes me as this guy wants to make something somewhere between the GPL and BSD licenses."

      You know just the top off my head I think LGPL, CCL, and the MPL would fit that bill.

      It's hard to know what people want but if you can't find an open source license that fits your needs you aren't really looking very hard.
  • Just what we need...another Open Source License. When will the madness end?

  • It's just like the GPL (Score:4, Funny)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:48AM (#12519692)
    Except it says "sir" and "humbly" a lot more.

  • Licensing maze (Score:4, Funny)

    by chiph ( 523845 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:50AM (#12519711)
    You are in a maze of twisty little licenses, all subtly different.

    Chip H.
  • ..but while I was browsing the IIT site ..i came across this. [iitb.ac.in] Seems like they've cornered the CEO/CTO market ;)
    • Great!

      If India has some CEO/CTO/CFO types to spare,
      the USA could sure make use of them. We have
      far too many greedy, lying, thieving, morally
      challenged corporate officer types here that
      could stand to spend some time in a "moral values
      re-education facility"^H^H^H prison.

      Not to mention that working at 1/10th the price
      of our current corporate overlords would be
      great for corporate morale, the shareholders, and
      the bottom line.

  • India and Pakistan are in a bar (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ind: We are having our own open source license now.
    Pak: So you think you are big shots with your own open source license now?
    Ind: We are super-power. Of course we have Open Source licenses! When will you get computers in your third world country?
    Pak: We have computers and many other things. You do not know about us, because your people live in shacks and answer the telephone for Americans.
    Ind: Better to live in a shack and have a high-paying technical job than to eat cows and live in huts as your p
  • I can't stand it when people make agreements between each other that aren't exactly as specified by one of The Holy Documents Of The Universal Community of Right-Minded Believers (i.e. Sanctus Codex Catholic Orthodox).

    But, if they're going to write new licenses, can they at least write them in English, or at least in something with a Latin alphabet.
  • What rights could be retained by such a license, exactly?

    While the spirit of the BSD license is refreshing, the unfortunate reality is that this license represents a one-way trip from the coder to industry, at no cost to industry.

    Why do you think Ballmer stated Microsoft's relative affinity for OpenBSD some time ago?

    In practice corporate collaboration on campus means little more than extremely low cost labor for the corporation.

    It sounds to me like this person doesn't particularly mind the work p

  • The English name for Mumbai is, of course, Bombay. Just like the English name for Muenchen is Munich and the French name for London is Londres.

  • Great... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fitten ( 521191 )
    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.

  • So what.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Haxwell ( 229790 )
    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 thriv

  • one more thing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Exter-C ( 310390 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @11:53AM (#12520418) Homepage
    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.
    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=USD &to=INR&amt=1&t=2y [yahoo.com]

    • You missed several points. First of all, the rest of the world is aware of the Indian IT boom; it appears that Indians did not learn from the U.S. There is nothing we can do about it :(

      The price of an average contractor has increased; take it from somebody who worked closely with the "other side." Also, top Indian business officials understand that their economy is as strong as the rest of the world that is willing to support it. As soon as the other contries cut the pipe, the outsourcing boom will become

    • The rupee has appreciated (gone up in value) over the past year.. from about Rs.49/dollar to about Rs.43/dollar now. The Indian Reserve Bank devalues the rupee by purchasing dollars to stem its rise so as to allow Indian exports to be competitive.
  • 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 i
  • 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. But if everyone is going to follow the new license and not release anything what benefit will there be for anyone else?

  • 1. All your codes are belong to us

    2. All your jobs are belong to us

    3. Let the hiliarity ensue
  • 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
  • Take the old BSD license. A completely reasonable license, with a small attribution to the author.Take the GPL license. A completely reasonable license, where you have to distribute the code with the binary by design.

    Now, pretend you want make an OSS project, and you're license-neutral really. You can choose code from one, but not the other. That is completely unreasonable and silly, but legally so. It was never intended to split OSS into many different code bases, with duplication of effort. If anything,

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