[Ilugc] BBC article
- From: binand@xxxxxxxxx (Binand Sethumadhavan)
- Date: Tue May 16 12:23:13 2006
On 16/05/06, Chakkaradeep C C <chaks.yoper@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Every linux community or LUG in India are trying out the same as Bill has
said.
Here is my view.One way i see this as a good job as we need language support
and on the other side, i see this has , we do not do anything new other than
adding localization support.
I also ask myself, if i have tamil version of each software and if i was
doing business, will i use it?. Immidiately,i get the answer "NO". Adding
localization support may be for personal use and thus Bill states,
Your mistake is that you consider yourself to be the average Indian.
You, my friend, represent a minority - urban Indians - 30% of the
total. You have had the full 15 or 16 years of education, you can
speak and express yourself clearly in English and you live in a
metropolis where most everyone you come in contact with also speaks
English. 70% of India do not have these opportunities.
A rural French or Spanish farmer has access to all kinds of
information that helps them in farming in their native language. Why
should the Indian farmer be deprived of this kind of help from modern
technology?
each software.Localization is one of the ways to make OSS available in India
but not OSS Development.
That is fine. But l10n is the best way for a fledgling LUG from a
distant minor town to make a difference, to apply their unique
position of being native speakers of a less popular language to the
betterment of their local community. L10n is where LUGs should start,
but I agree with you that it should not be the raison d'etre for the
LUG.
Think of RedHat,Novell,Xandros - are anybody from India?.When is such a
company/firm where we have an Indian Based (please, its not localization
which tells indian based!) Linux Distribution. Localization should be
options but not the main goal.
Redhat and Novell both have SDCs in India. I remember a few companies
that had their own distributions too - for example, my ex-employer,
Retort Software - www.retortsoft.com - has a Linux distribution for
the non-IT industries. Several biggies with factories in interior
Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, with corporate offices in
Mumbai and Pune use this distro, Alice, for HO-BO-Factory
communications.
Do anybody have a list of indian oss tools/apps/softwares ? Not localization
projects but real development projects?
Fred Noronha had created such a list a long time ago - 10 minutes on
Google should help you locate it. From the highly successful Anjuta to
several small .pms on CPAN - Indians have done it all. Dr. Sani of
LUG-Nagpur and Raj Mathur of LUG-Delhi (who is also mentioned in the
original BBC article) have written a lot of PHP and Perl code
respectively for their own businesses, released under the GPL or a
comparable license.
Binand
Other related posts: