17 Feb
2010
17 Feb
'10
8:08 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 11:44 PM, ck raju <ck.thrissur(a)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]