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BANGALORE: Computers built from scratch are part of technology folklore. Now it is the turn of the mobile phone. Two Indians, Surj Patel and Deva Seetharam are working on a homebrewed cell phone, which will challenge the quality and capabilities of traditional models available in the market today.
Working on the project for two weeks, the two are confirming American writer Thomas Friedman's belief that innovation is no longer confined to the realm of big companies.
Deva explains, "We are building an open source hardware/software Linux-based cell phone." Open source refers to a programme for which the source code (written by a programmer and converted into machine language) is available to the public to use or modify free of cost. The prototype they are working on will be open source and will help developers build powerful applications as they like.
Reading this article and recalling Agassi and the very latest babble of Gates (well he always talked along that line) I wonder whether there is a campaign under way which tries to discredit free software (and especially the GPL) while praising the open source-movement.
Well I can imagine the likes of IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other big companies loving the Apache, BSD, Mozilla and eclipse-licenses which grant them the right to take the code and still keep everything they build upon it closed and proprietary - which of course is exactly the reason I would always prefer the GPL for projects I contribute to.
[ Whoa. While previewing I noticed that even the spellchecker of this forum doesn't approve of the GPL ;-) ]
Is it really a new trend of arguing or has it been going on for much longer and I only just realized it? Since some historically very well versed people are among us, I'd really like to know.
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Well I can imagine the likes of IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other big companies loving the Apache, BSD, Mozilla and eclipse-licenses which grant them the right to take the code and still keep everything they build upon it closed and proprietary - which of course is exactly the reason I would always prefer the GPL for projects I contribute to.
[ Whoa. While previewing I noticed that even the spellchecker of this forum doesn't approve of the GPL ;-) ]
Is it really a new trend of arguing or has it been going on for much longer and I only just realized it? Since some historically very well versed people are among us, I'd really like to know.