The agenda for the Sept 12th GLUG meet is slowly shaping up. Prof. DB Phatak of IIT Bombay will be one of the speakers. Prof. Phatak is the person responsible for persuading LIC to shift 10,000 desktops to Linux and has been evangelizing the use of FLOSS in engineering colleges across India. He is on the IT committees of many central and state government organizations and is therefore a highly influential figure. I will reconfirm his participation and circulate details of his talk next week.
His talk will be followed by a talk on the licensing issues relevant to FLOSS by technology lawyers, Ms. Nappinai and Subramaniam Vutha of the Technology Law Forum. They work closely with the Mumbai Cyber Crime Cell and I have asked them to address the issue that Linux Torvalds recently raised in an interview to Businessweek magazine (see link and excerpt below my signature). This is becoming an issue that all of us are getting increasingly concerned about because Open Source has so much promise for India, but the licensing issues hold so much peril.
I hope everyone finds the upcoming GLUG meet an enjoyable and educative experience.
Venky
Linux Torvalds' Benevolent Dictatorship http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040818_1593.htm
Q: What are the biggest challenges facing Linux? A: From a technical standpoint, I don't see any real challenges. Linux has come a long way in the last 13 years. I'll do another 13 years if that's what it takes. Technology wise, we're great. And we'll get better.
The only things I worry about are all the things that go around the project. Part of it is legal issues. It's not that I think Linux has legal problems, but that the system doesn't work as well as it should, and crazy things happen, like the SCO suits [SCO (SCOX ) claims IBM (IBM ) breached a longtime contract by providing SCO-owned technology to Linux developers and has filed a lawsuit claiming $5 billion in damages. The trial isn't expected to start until November, 2005]. They will get slapped down in court. But as Linux gets really important, strange things come up.
Software patents concern me. I worry about some greedy companies -- possibly failing ones, trying to make trouble and abusing the system. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
We have random people in random countries working on random things, and they don't have 1,000 patent lawyers. So I'm not worried about one patent in particular, but the whole system. It's not a problem today. But it's a thing I can't control, unlike the technical side, where I can actually do something.
I'm not that concerned about the threat of Microsoft (MSFT ) enforcing patents against Linux. I think their mode of operation isn't through the legal system. I think they hate lawyers more than most companies. They've been on the receiving end. [CEO Steve] Ballmer and [Chairman Bill] Gates have pride in the fact that their competition may have tried to crush them with legal wars, but they overcame. I think they would have a hard time using legal tactics. They would be ashamed.
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