[Fsf-friends] Re: suggestions needed on an initiative

[Joe Steeve]

Krishna Pagadala <krishnaact@yahoo.com> writes:
> same lines. Since all students are required to do some or the
> other projects. I was thinking that we should try to leverage
> that time. Especially we should try to encourage CS engineering
> final year project to be free software.

Some colleges (actually many in Tamil Nadu) give more credit to
students who do their projects in a company (even CS). This makes
the project owned by whatever company they are doing their
respective projects in, and it becomes a company policy to either
give the software out as Free Software or not.

Ideally, colleges should not allow this to happen. They should
have the terms clear that the students should submit the source
code along with the project reports. But, this is not so. Often, a
`company project` is a easy title by which the students can escape
From the project work. They can simply claim they did the project,
and then not submit the sources saying its company policy. This
happens in a number of colleges here. In most of these cases, the
companies are usually startup or not-heard-of, and all they'd need
is some money from the student to endorse the project.

So the place to attack is not the students., but rather the
colleges. The colleges should make it mandatory for all project
software to be given under a non-restrictive license to the
college. And the college top-brass should be educated to release
all this software as Free Software on their own portals. This way,
the college would get a name and these free software projects
would really help the students learn something.

-- 
.O. A proud GNU user
..O http://www.joesteeve.tk/
OOO http://joe.bsdnerds.org/
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