[ILUG-BOM] Linux India Initiative

[Kapil Karekar]

Hi Luggers!

The issue of IPR is not very important for most of the programmers.
However it is very important to companies who want to build a viable
and profitable business.

The linux lunacy trip was a great eye-opener in this regard. I have
been searching around for viable Free Software based business models.
As per my limited understanding of the topic I can think of three ways
in which the Free Software paradigm can be applied to s/w development.

1. The Free S/w philosophy should be applied completely when s/w is
being developed by government agencies. Except in cases where national
security interests are concerned the source for all s/w developed
should be freely available. The money that the government is spending
is the people's money and hence everybody has a right to benefit from
it. This would lower the government's expenditure as bugs would be
reported and modified faster, and people could adapt the s/w to suit
their own needs.

2. The second option is to provide the source code only when the
client asks for it. This is the approach which we normally associate
with the Free S/w philosophy. This is fine for companies developing
customised s/w for a particular client. However it doesn't suit well
to companies which are into product development. How can a company
ensure that the source code for the product developed after years of
work is not copied by some other company. S/w hijackers can just lift
snippets of code from the available sorce code and make a s/w of there
own. This would eat away the market for the original company.
This brings us to the third option.

3. The third option, in my opinion, suits well to product based
companies. The company should be bound to release the source code of
the product in the event of
    -    Support being discontinued for the product.
    -    The company is being bought by some other company.
    -    The company is closing down.
    This option sheilds product based companies from hijackers. It
also gives the option to the clients of the company to support
themselves when support is no longer available.

Keep your opinions rolling...

Cheers :-))
Kapil Karekar
Libre Technologies
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Let us build a Free Software Economy
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