[Fsf-friends] Microsoft Research India to Work on UIDAI

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 11:44 PM, ck raju <ck.thrissur at gmail.com> wrote:
> Microsoft Research India announced its involvement in the Unique
> Identification of India (UIDAI) project at TechVista 2010 in
> Bangalore. The project seeks to provide valid identities to India's
> population of more than a billion people. "I am looking forward to
> working with researchers on technologies like multilingual computing
> and biometrics," says UIDAI chairperson Nandan Nilekani. Microsoft
> Research India also launched a portal for the computer science
> community called ResearchAndYou.com. The portal is designed to bridge
> the gap between computer science researchers and the large pool of
> potential research talent in India. The Web site will provide students
> with an interactive forum where they can connect with researchers to
> ask questions and explore research opportunities. The site also will
> act as a single source of information for resources in different
> disciplines. TechVista 2010 also brought together a panel of ACM A.M.
> Turing award recipients, including Barbara Liskov, Tony Hoare, Butler
> Lampson, and Tony Hey, to discuss the future of computing.
> http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20100215/news02.shtml
> ------------------------
>
> For long, Infosys had been a strategic partner of Microsoft. What else
> can we expect from Nandan ?

FWIW, there's an interesting document titled:
http://www.uidai.nic.in/tenders/code_contribution_to_uidai_final.pdf

It is titled: "Invitation to the Developer Community to contribute to
the development of Enrolment Software for UIDAI". It essentially asks
"any Company or an existing open source project and even individual
developers" to voluntarily code for the commission (with no guarantees
whether the code will be accepted or not). The copyright and "IPR"
goes to the commission who "reserves the right to open source any part
or in full, any of these components and contributions in the future
for the betterment of the community." (so no guarantees on that as
well).

While the document itself seems to be quite clueless (especially as
far as Free Software goes), I fear that it will be later used against
the FOSS community as "we had given out a call for participation, but
none from the FOSS community responded".. and similar crap.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]