[ILUG-BOM] Linux India Initiative

[Tahir Hashmi]

On Wed, 25 Dec 2002 13:54:31 +0530
Kapil Karekar wrote:

>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

It's not necessary to distribute free software at all, and making
the source code available is mandated only if the software is to
be distributed. GoI can very well keep it's secret software and
associated source code with itself. If GoI later plans to
distribute some of it's secret software, there's no particular
reason why the source code to it should be hidden. Free Software
!= source code available for public download. Not always.

>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 can not be ensured with closed source either. Reverse
engineering is one way people breach closed source too. The
motive to hijack source code may be strong for small-time
developers developing small-time applications. For large
corporations, fear of legal action is a large enough deterrent.

Secondly, for a company to make a complex piece of software based
on an already complex piece of software (say a web-server based
on code hijacked from the Apache Project) and to make
enough improvements to it make it's proprietary product more
desirable, the company would have to make a lot many changes to
the code.

In the process the code would become sufficiently
different from the original codebase and the company won't have
anyone to turn to for support since benefits/changes applicable
to free project code no longer apply to the hijacked codebase.
Thus the company would have to train it's own coders to
understand the hijacked codebase. AFA my personal experience
goes, it is easier to code from scratch than understand an
existing piece of code inside-out for complex systems.

Also, in the 18 year long history of GNU and FSF's existence not
a single case of someone creating a proprietary project that
trumped a Free Software project whose code it hijacked has come
to the fore. Well, the TCP/IP stack in MS Windows is another
story, which is why it is highly advisable to go for "Protective
Freedom" through licenses like GPL.

-- 
Tahir Hashmi (VSE, NCST)
http://staff.ncst.ernet.in/tahir
tahir AT ncst DOT ernet DOT in

We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed