FOSS and Public Policy : Challenges and Opportunities

rahul .poruri (~rahul66)


3

Votes

Description:

Programmers want to put their heads down and write code. They don't want to deal with legalese and policies. That's the responsibility of management. In our experience, this is especially true for most FOSS developers in India. Therefore, a lot of us shy away from thinking about Public Policy in India and how it impacts what we do (and vice-versa i.e. how we can impact it).

FOSS is inherently political. All FOSS projects come with a copyright license e.g. MIT, Apache, BSD, GPL and without meaningful copyright enforcement, companies can use and abuse FOSS without any consequences. Private entities and Governmental agencies have sent take-down requests to GitHub to remove FOSS projects, which GitHub followed because of weak Public Policy. Our existing Public Policies incentivize Software Patenting, which means that industrial and academic organizations are unnecessarily spending money closing off their Intellectual Property from the public instead of opening them up by creating FOSS. Existing laws around FOSS adoption in India aren't being enforced. The Government of India has repeatedly attempted open-washing e.g. with UPI, for reasons which aren't clear to the general public.

In this talk, we will discuss * the value that FOSS provides to the global economy * the economic opportunity for India * the existing incentive structures for the industry, academia, and the government * the metrics that are currently used and how they need to be changed * how all of these impact us and * how we can have an impact on Public Policy

Prerequisites:

N/A

Content URLs:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BcwOaBQGl8GVEuDa5X-JbIn0PJIqSIo-z4eE8JAQ7Ho/edit?usp=sharing

Speaker Info:

Rahul is the CEO of FOSS United and the Head of Software at SoftCircuits Labs. As a Scientific Software Developer for eight years, Rahul heavily relied on FOSS, especially on the Scientific Python ecosystem, to build and ship software for Scientific R&D teams at Fortune 500 companies. During that time, he started maintaining multiple Python packages in the Scientific Python ecosystem, a few of which helped NASA put the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars. After volunteering for more than an year with FOSS United, he now works full-time to discover Community Governance mechanisms and to set the right processes and structures in place to ensure long-term sustainability of FOSS United. He still tries to review Pull Requests on GitHub every week.

Speaker Links:

  • Website - https://rahulporuri.github.io/
  • LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulporuri/
  • GitHub - https://github.com/rahulporuri
  • PyPI - https://pypi.org/user/rporuri/
  • YouTube link to talk at ChennaiFOSS 2.0 by FOSS United - https://youtu.be/6Xfj6NyKSgE?si=QfR0wAAdRAWr6TUF
    • I delivered an updated version of the talk at BelPy 2024 - https://belpy.in/speakers.html
  • YouTube link to talk at MumbaiFOSS 2022 by FOSS United - https://youtu.be/4VMUl3z85Gw?si=aNr-axcA61uyc0sU

Section: Community
Type: Talk
Target Audience: Beginner
Last Updated: