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Back from Delhi
Just back from a 10 day trip to Delhi!
These 10 days are definitely unforgettable for many reasons other than just visiting places in and around Delhi. For people interested, the photos are available at http://www.medhas.org/gallery/
These 10 days are definitely unforgettable for many reasons other than just visiting places in and around Delhi. For people interested, the photos are available at http://www.medhas.org/gallery/
Software Patents in India
Happened to read an article (political?) about an amendment to the patent law in India. Here is what the article had to say about the amendment.
Indian software industry is mostly based on services and has very few products to its credit, that also means that we have lesser original work and patents. Software patents becoming legal could mean supressing Indian software industry from entering the world software product market!
Given the disadvantages, NASSCOM is said to have supported the government too. Is NASSCOM which is known to represent the Indian software industry really representing the smaller companies???
[Thanks, rajan for the link]
The Indian Patent Act, as modified in 2002 had made non patentable the following:
"a mathematical method or a business method or a computer prgramme per se or algorithms".
The recent amendment states instead:
"a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms;"
[...]
Why is patenting a problem for the software industry? After patenting was allowed in the US, smaller developers and independent software companies have been under severe attack. Large companies have the ability to buy up patents, keep on filing patents and can tie up smaller companies in costly law suits for years. Therefore, moving from a copyright regime to a software patenting one, simply makes the cost of developing new software many times higher. Copyright is virtually automatic, there are no costs associated with copyrights; patents have to be filed and filing imposes fairly high costs. If they have to be filed in a number of countries, the costs multiply.
"a mathematical method or a business method or a computer prgramme per se or algorithms".
The recent amendment states instead:
"a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms;"
[...]
Why is patenting a problem for the software industry? After patenting was allowed in the US, smaller developers and independent software companies have been under severe attack. Large companies have the ability to buy up patents, keep on filing patents and can tie up smaller companies in costly law suits for years. Therefore, moving from a copyright regime to a software patenting one, simply makes the cost of developing new software many times higher. Copyright is virtually automatic, there are no costs associated with copyrights; patents have to be filed and filing imposes fairly high costs. If they have to be filed in a number of countries, the costs multiply.
Indian software industry is mostly based on services and has very few products to its credit, that also means that we have lesser original work and patents. Software patents becoming legal could mean supressing Indian software industry from entering the world software product market!
Given the disadvantages, NASSCOM is said to have supported the government too. Is NASSCOM which is known to represent the Indian software industry really representing the smaller companies???
[Thanks, rajan for the link]
Software Patents???
Was reading a few articles about software patents. I am pretty sure that more people than not are NOT AWARE of what could be the implications of software patents becoming legal. So here it is, an image from typo3.org which more or less summarises it.
Imagine paying royalty to someone just for using a progress bar or a tabbed dialog! yuck! It sucks.
Here are a couple of links for more information on software patents. No prizes for discovering that these links are among the first few google results for "software patents":
Imagine paying royalty to someone just for using a progress bar or a tabbed dialog! yuck! It sucks.
Here are a couple of links for more information on software patents. No prizes for discovering that these links are among the first few google results for "software patents":
Missing a "meta content-type" tag
Now that I worked on the eenadu2utf thing for a while, I got used to having look at the eenadu site. When I did that today morning, I was surprised to see that barely anything could be readable on the site... So what was the problem?
A missing "meta content-type" tag, the browser (firefox) failed to recognize the encoding used in the page (homepage of eenadu.net) and hence was not able to display the text!
I am sure the folks at eenadu would have tested the page before uploading it to the server, but the worst thing did happen, they probably tested it on "Internet Explorer" only.
This probably is another great disadvantage of unusual encodings - the browsers don't recognize them.
A missing "meta content-type" tag, the browser (firefox) failed to recognize the encoding used in the page (homepage of eenadu.net) and hence was not able to display the text!
I am sure the folks at eenadu would have tested the page before uploading it to the server, but the worst thing did happen, they probably tested it on "Internet Explorer" only.
This probably is another great disadvantage of unusual encodings - the browsers don't recognize them.
Eenadu 2 UTF
Eenadu is one of the most read news papers in Telugu. The online edition of the paper is at http://www.eenadu.net/. Don't worry if you cannot read it, the site currently uses a strange
encoding, which can probably only be displayed using the "eenadu" font which is downloadable from the site. There is a huge telugu corpus going waste in a proprietary encoding! huh!
Apart from a few other things, this was one that kept me busy for the last week, finally after hacking the font, and reverse engineering their encoding, I could create a script/program that converts a given html page from eenadu.net to a UTF-8 encoded web page.
For now, the script can probably be used only to convert pages one after other, but if every thing goes right, it should be possible to convince the eenadu team to migrate to unicode... Hope it turns out this way!!!
encoding, which can probably only be displayed using the "eenadu" font which is downloadable from the site. There is a huge telugu corpus going waste in a proprietary encoding! huh!
Apart from a few other things, this was one that kept me busy for the last week, finally after hacking the font, and reverse engineering their encoding, I could create a script/program that converts a given html page from eenadu.net to a UTF-8 encoded web page.
For now, the script can probably be used only to convert pages one after other, but if every thing goes right, it should be possible to convince the eenadu team to migrate to unicode... Hope it turns out this way!!!
Software is like sex: It's better when it's free.
-- Linus Torvalds,
from FSF T-shirt