Exploration of open source licensing model as a tool to enhance digitalization in Bangladesh

Abstract

The twenty first century offers us the greatest gift that human kind can achieve – technology by which we can now explore the riches of global village from any corner of the world. In the global village that we live in, information technology has made tremendous strides to make the lives of people more productive and more convenient. Bangladesh has been making inroads into the adoption of technology though at a slower rate than the developed world. In this paper, we have explored socio-legal framework that would facilitate digitalization and benefit for the stakeholders, namely, consumers, vendors, software developers and society in general. In particular, we have explored the modalities of open source licensing and investigated the barriers, its positive impacts on consumers and developers, and implementation of the licensing model from social and legal perspectives. It is a general perception that the cost of licensing remains out of reach for most of the computer users in Bangladesh. Most of the popular software are proprietary in nature, copyright protected and of foreign origin. As a result of prohibiting cost of acquiring software, consumers are often dissuaded from purchasing licensed products. As a consequence, consumers in the developing countries such as Bangladesh are inclined to use non-licensed software, which is a clear violation of copyright laws, and suffers from lacking features and support for the software. On the contrary, open source licensing holds the promise of delivering software free of cost with creative features and appropriate customization for the end-users. We conducted an exploratory study on the implications of using open-source licensing both in legal and societal contexts of Bangladesh. We relied mostly on secondary data. Our research demonstrates that open source licensing could facilitate the adoption of technology at a higher rate. Open source licensing could expedite the use and distribution of software in conformance with national and international legal standards. We also found that compared to developed countries, Bangladeshi users are not often encouraged from the government bodies to use and disseminate open-source licensed products.