[Fsf-friends] India eyes own open-source license

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

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.'"....