IIT Mumbai professor proposes alternative to Open Source License

Finding the GNU General Public License (GPL) too restrictive with regard to derived works, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai is working on an alternative license that will allow people to take commercial benefit from work derived from an open-source program.

Finally someone has taken the lead to break from the clutches of GPL.

Version 2 of the GPL requires that “you must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.”

Developers and users also face the problem of changing open-source license terms, Phatak said.
Phatak favors a license modeled on the University of California, Berkeley’s BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). He hopes to modify the BSD license and make it a perpetual license. “This way even the original writer of the license will not be able to modify it,” said Phatak. “So developers and users are not threatened by license revisions.”