Monday, February 6, 2006
Since I spent two of the days I was on break at IT Kerala, blogging about it wouldn’t hurt. From the outset though, I’ll say that there’s not much to talk about. Like I said earlier, the tone set is more in the vein of a village fair than anything business-oriented or techy.
That being said, all the big names in India had a presence there: Intel had two stalls, though none were manned by the company themselves, and I had an interesting time confusing people by asking about the Core Duo processor. The guys were helpful as much as they were able to, but the information was contradictory. I asked about the Apple switch to Intel, and when the new Apple notebooks would be available and received scant information. In the Microsoft stall too, I could not find a single company representative. There were people manning the stall, but none of them had their hands up when I asked for somebody from Microsoft. They were promoting localization in a big way, showcasing Malayalam inside Office: nothing revolutionary. I was also interested in Project Shiksha, a scheme similar to the one that I earlier hinted at, but as was the rule, there was nobody to dole out more information. I dutifuly left my card in a big glass bowl and went gawking at other sights.
Toonz Animation, a company I’ve admired from afar had a nice stall there and I spent quite a good while watching their in-house productions. Not Pixar, but they’ve certainly come a long way since I first saw their videos. Toonz offers courses in 3D Animation and whatnot, but like many computer coaching classes out to make big bucks, they don’t train module by module. The complete package costs something like 70K. I was interested for my bro, but then thought better of the whole thing.
NeST also had a stall, but they were marketing something exceedingly interesting: spices. Yeah, that’s right, you heard me. Spices. NeST condiments had the best smelling stall out there, with an assortment of their wares on display. I thought my days of sleep deprivation had gotten to me when I saw that stall first, but nope. Spices alright. For a company with 20-ish tech subsidiaries, they certainly picked an amazing one to showcase at an IT fest.
The job fair was a huge affair. 99 in 100 people at IT Kerala seemed to be there just for the job, and there are rumours more than 60K candidates attended. I pity those people at Bigleap who organized the event; I’ve worked with them before when they had a small event at Pankaj around a half-year back, but the scale of this recruitment drive was unbelievable. Debated whether to talk to somebody out there and see familiar faces, but the sheer scale of the event was daunting. Waving my delegate card, I was able to cooly walk into all the restricted zones, and I saw a lot of behind-the-scenes talk. The HR people there became a bit crazy after a while methinks, because some interviews were fun to watch :-). Another small observation: if you don’t get placed in-campus, it’s almost 100x as difficult to walk into an interview like this and get a job.
Again, calling this a business event is a joke. I walked through US Soft, Infy, TCS, IBS, and Wipro with some ideas that we had and couldn’t find a single person who I could talk to directly. Maybe those companies are too big, but if good ideas don’t come from the ground up, how will they grow?
Anyways, enough of that, I’ve updated my photo set at Flickr with way more photos. Enjoy.
Tags: business • review
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Thursday, February 2, 2006
Allo to my friends from Kakkanad, Kochi. It’s a bright, sunny morning, and the love is strong, really strong in the air. Yesterday, after a closeted, stifling but fun trip down from Trivandrum, we went over to the IT Kerala ‘06. It’s a pretty small place - and very much less developed than at Technopark, but still decently nice. The stalls are sturdy, clean and squeakingly polished, and we had a corner at the IIITM-K stall.
I’ve also uploaded a photo set to Flickr which I’ll update as the days go by.
One of the things that’s pretty obvious about a fest like this is that regardless of the hype, I don’t think there’s a lot of business being transacted a the event. It’s more in the nature of a ‘fair’ where the public comes to gawk in wonder (or pretend wonder) at the stuff exhibited. The only tech marvel I saw for example, was a pretty decently made path-finding obstruction-overcoming robot with a cam built in. It was fun playing around with it so much so that the people who made it finally asked me to get out of the way ;-). Microsoft also had a stall, but sadly no Longhorn previews - just a Windows Media Center demo. I’ll probably investigate all the stalls more thoroughly at a later date.
Tags: business • chaff
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Monday, January 30, 2006
The recent surge of patriotic movies and national fervour aside, whenever I go out today, I’m met more by a sense of optimism and hard-work-being-done than the traditional Indian way of treating work as a holiday. My view is of course, extremely myopic, but there is indeed something happening in this country that will make it soon
explode into the world scene.
Selling India Inc. at Davos is an interesting article on how the attitudes towards India have changed.
Tags: business • politics
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Sunday, December 4, 2005
This post is more in the tone of thinking-out-loud and asking for opinions and comments than my usual discourse. As for why this post is here and now, I’ll leave that for later, when some ideas are more mature.
The GPL - for people who need that background - is a copyleft license that essentially invokes four conditions as a premise for freedom (quoting the wikipedia GPL article):
- the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- the freedom to study how the program works, and modify it. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this)
- the freedom to redistribute copies.
- the freedom to improve the program, and release the improvements to the public. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this)
In a commercial environment, such freedoms more often than not do not allow making money out of a GPL-ed venture. The traditional sell, hold Intellectual Property (IP), and ensure market dominance strategy does not work out because any client can excercise eir freedom and release your work to the public. While customers can hold you to an NDA, the reverse is never true. Your intellectual property can be squandered with disdain, and this is in a sense, understandable, because GPL and its ideology precludes “ownership” of information, and hence does not understand that term.
I am not a GPL guy (and never will be) - the BSD/MIT license is more my personal taste - but I respect the safety-net provisions in the GPL and understand why those provisions are in place. In any coding community - Drupal for instance being a small microcosm - there are developers who work long and hard at their code. They do have a right to expect somebody else using their code to contribute something back. [Digression: the point I contend is that such a contribution should be enforced - I strongly believe that people when left alone, are essentially good-at-heart and will contribute back anything that they can, and any perceived shortcomings of the BSD/MIT license for not including this clause does not stand up to even evil corporates: the most elegantly designed OS ever (perhaps) is built on a free license, and it contributes something back too]. But since I understand the reason behind the clauses, when I do business with GPL-ed software, I would like to respect its provisions, and still find a way to make money.
Questions
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Supposing my company is asked to make an accounting solution for a client, and I use an opensource software as the base, but add in my own customizations. My customizations do not stand alone, and therefore, can’t be licensed under a separate, more constricting license. Taking into consideration the IP issues mentioned above, what is the best business model for me to pursue in this instance? How do I make money off GPL? Read [1], [2], [3], and [4], analyze, ponder, brainstorm and decide.
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How does a totally hosted-solution figure into the picture? Supposing my product is a totally internally hosted solution, like say, Basecamp (but of course, based on opensource technologies), am I violating the GPL by making my customizations “available” to my clients without providing the source? Specifically, I’d like a clear distinction between “using” a program and distributing it - the GPL (at least, version 2) does not seem to give a clear picture regarding hosted web services.
It’s interesting to note what the GPL FAQ says about the issue: (Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?)
No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.
However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.
Note that, for a hosted solution, there is no transfer of copies of the program, it remains under internal control. So, in this case, is it both legal and ethical to customize a GPL-ed program without releasing the source?
If it doesn’t violate the letter of the GPL, it certainly seems to violate the spirit. There is no way to know the “inner workings” of the program, neither is there a way to tweak it.
- As an addition to 1 above, find out how companies on Opensource models survive. From Redhat, to the near and dear Linuxense.
Conclusion: I definitely do want to use GPL (and even BSD) to do business, but I’m still deciding how exactly to go about it, and what constitutes a sustainable revenue model.
Tags: business • development • musings
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