http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5701861.html
India eyes own open-source license
By Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: May 11, 2005, 4:00 AM PT
MUMBAI, India--In the seemingly never-ending quest to balance openness with
profits, one of India's more influential professors is devising yet another
open-source licensing program.
Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology has kicked off an effort to
create the Knowledge Public License, or KPL, a 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. The license will
likely function much like the Berkeley Software Distribution or the MIT License
programs, he added.
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.
Ideally, such a program could also help ease the raging tensions between the
open-source software movement and proprietary software companies.
"The free software people are afflicted by what I call the J factor, which is
the jealousy factor. The proprietary people are afflicted by the G factor, the
greed factor. They want to maximally extract money from the world," Phatak said
in an interview here. "I am working to tell the world, 'Please permit these
groups to coexist peacefully and harmoniously. There is a tremendous advantage
to everyone.'"
"Legally, we have to move very carefully because the Americans have a tendency
to sue anybody for anything," he added.
The number of open-source licensing programs has expanded rapidly in the past
few years. Under some programs, such as the General Public License, developers
have to publish their modifications if the modifications are used outside their
own operations.
Many in the open-source community have complained about the proliferation of
licensing models and taken action to curtail the numbers.
Budding software powerhouse
If anything, Phatak's licensing 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, he said. That's up from 1983, when
there were 70 colleges admitting 5,000 students a year.
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.
END OF FORWARDED STORY
[Thanks to Sunil Abraham for drawing attention to this story.-FN]
_____
_/ ____\____ Frederick Noronha (FN) * Freelance Journalist
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