[fedora-india] IBM and the indian debacle

[Dipanjan Chakraborty]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 5:49 PM, anirudh singh shekhawat <
shekhawat.anirudh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Everyone feared IBM in the good old days, when guys in black suits and tie
> would either make you go out of business or buy you off the hook. IBM guys
> were considered evil big brothers, who were ruthless and sung company songs.
> So anyways IBM seemed to have changed quite a lot in recent years and we all
> know its open support towards free and open source mentality, and anyways I
> am here to talk about what is it doing right now which actually violates
> that very philosophy.
>
> There is a very popular competition which IBM runs in india called TGMC
> (The great mind challenge) [1] for students. Well that is all good but the
> tricky part comes here. IBM only accepts projects made using its technology
> i.e. the tools which only IBM provides to the educational institute you are
> in and yes, they dont give these tools to individuals, they can only be
> acquired once your institute is in the program and it so happens that IBM
> after sending its big boys to your institute and, your college will soon
> will make it compulsory for everyone in the final year to make their major
> projects for IBM, and my college is one of them and we are stuck with making
> our major projects in TGMC if we want or not.
>
Yes, TGMC is quite popular. They arrived in our college too (thankfully our
authorities do not encourage database based projects and didn't fall for it)

> The tools to be used are : Rational Rose/RSA
> RAD/Eclipse/WSAD/ WebSphere Portal
> WAS/WAS CE
> DB2 Express – ‘C’ or DB2 UDB
>
Is it wrong for them to do so? The only reason they are doing this is to
popularise their products and make students acquainted with them.

> and as it seems that you cant do this project without IBM's help. But what
> is more important are the Terms and Conditions, what it has imposed on all
> student developers working on it, here is an interesting one :-
>
> "By submitting entries, entrant grants IBM and their agents of the program
> the right to publish, use, adapt, sell, edit and/or modify such entry in any
> way, in commerce and in any and all media worldwide, including but not
> limited to the Internet, without limitation and without compensation to the
> entrants. Entrant also grants IBM worldwide irrevocable, nonexclusive and
> royalty-free right and license to use, have used, copy, reproduce, transfer,
> modify and/or display any information contained in their entry in whole or
> part and in any form without compensation." for a complete set of Terms and
> Conditions [2]
>
Well, there are lots of other organisations who have similar terms. If one
happens to send in entries to a writing contest of some sort, one will face
similar conditions. Is it not violating intellectual property rights?

>  Woah!! So that means you dont own your work, it just does not belong to
> you. I wonder what is this giant teaching young students on this country.
> And what is this policy where, on one hand its promoting open source and on
> the other its doing this.
>
And this is not limited to my college alone, I know a lot many college in
> jaipur, rajasthan, india which have fallen for this and have made it
> mandatory for their students to work on it.
>
> [1]  http://tgmc.in
>
> [2] https://tgmc.in/terms_conditions.php?id=8
>
> regards
> Acedip
>
> --
> My web home http://acedip.in
> Linux Users Group Jaipur http://lugj.in
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>
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-- 
Yours sincerely,
Dipanjan Chakraborty
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