Category Archives: Technology

The music company T-series has an interesting story. Once upon a time, Gulshan Kumar rose from being a mere fruit juice seller to a major music retailer. T-Series was built by stretching the legalities of copyright law in India. They took commercial songs, got it sung by several lesser known singers creating a ‘version recording’ of the song and sold them at much lesser prices. They had legal backup- the void in the copyright act, which allowed such ‘version recordings’ on the service of a notice on the rights holders and payment of a statutory compulsory licensing fee. Making hundreds of such ‘cover versions’, they often made more sales than the rights holders themselves! Continue reading →

It has to be understood by the young software developers that for the open source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As rms says, “Open source is a development methodology, free software is a social movement.” For the open source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution. Continue reading →