On Thursday 12 May 2005 00:49, Frederick Noronha (FN) wrote:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5701861.html

India eyes own open-source license By Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: May 11, 2005, 4:00 AM PT

MUMBAI, India--In the seemingly never-ending quest to balance openness with profits, one of India's more influential professors is devising yet another open-source licensing program.

Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology has kicked off an effort to create the Knowledge Public License, or KPL, a licensing program that will let programmers share ideas with one another while at the same time allowing them to retain the rights to their own software modifications.

the gpl automatically retains the copyrights of the creator with the creator. The creator assigns these rights to others. He can also provide the same work with any other licence he chooses. What the gpl specifically disallows is taking this code and using it without providing the recipients the rights granted by the contributor and contributors with accreditation etc. Nothing prevents you or me from obtaining a piece of code under a different licence form the copyright holder. With all due respect to the justifiably lauded Prof. Pathak, I see this licence as yet another (doomed) attempt like the Sun licence. What commercial organisations would love to do is get their hands on other's work without having to do the hardwork or paying. IMO you can take copyrighted code, read it and REIMPLEMENT it independently. But that would be incredible hard with gpld code because gpld code resolves quickly with the most optimal solution. Recoding would mostly end up with a much less than optimal solution, not counting other very MAJOR cost factors like testing and documenting and paying for people who can actually think. IMO its not the licence but the bussiness model which needs some creative thinking.

rgds jtd