[PLUG] IBM and the great indian debacle

[anirudh singh shekhawat]

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.

The tools to be used are : Rational Rose/RSA
RAD/Eclipse/WSAD/ WebSphere Portal
WAS/WAS CE
DB2 Express – ‘C’ or DB2 UDB

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]

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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