We missed this last month: Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme, which has been sponsoring the development of Indian language tech resources, has decided (pdf) to make it cheaper to get access to this technology for external stakeholders: while it was earlier free only for Indian academic researchers, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has announced that startups can use these resources free of cost, MSME's at 10% of cost, International Academic Researchers at 10% of cost, and Big Companies, MNCs and Foreign Entities at 50% of the cost. The cost here refers to the cost of creation of the resource "at the current rates". These resources will be made available through CDAC. Oddly enough, Indian academic researchers and startups, which get these resources for free, will need to sign non-disclosure agreements with C-DAC. It's not clear which products are on sale or available for licensing at TDIL. Their website lists the following products: IndoWordnet LPMS Sandhan Online Sanskrit Tools Sanskrit E-learning & Multimedia Web OCR Text To Speech Anuvadaksh (English to Indian Language Machine Translation System) English to Indian Languages Machine Translation through Angla -Bharti Technology Sampark: Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation Online Hindi Wordnet Glossary Updation Tool / Terminology Bank Shouldn't it be free for everyone? Shouldn't this software be free for everyone, and under Creative Commons licensing approach, wherein it is available to use and build on? We had made the following recommendation on government produced software and content back in 2008, when the…
