Linux World News

RED HAT GOES INDIC

With the recent release of Fedora Core 3, the Red Hat supported community project, Red Hat had already given users a preview of the company's ambitions towards Indic localization. The first languages to be supported are Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Tamil. As part of the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat showcased the beta version of the Bengali desktop at Infocom 2004 in Kolkatta. Infocom is billed as the largest IT show in Eastern India. Scheduled in the first week of December, it is the ideal venue for companies to showcase technological advances. On December 2 2004, West Bengal's Minister in charge of IT, Manabendra Mukherjee, released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 beta version in Bangla or Bengali, the language spoken in Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian State of West Bengal. The Government of West Bengal has introduced an e-governance roadmap underlining the need to use local languages at the public access points where services are offered. Referring to the government's open source initiatives, which are already quite evident, the minister said he expected the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Bangla to augment the government's citizen centric efforts to provide better quality of services especially in the land record and village upliftment sectors. He also talked about the Computer Literacy Project, which is aimed at schools, stating that he believed that Bangla on the desktop would add value to the ongoing project. At its Infocom booth, Red Hat had put a user feedback process in place. Visitors were requested to take some time to browse the desktop interface in the local language and perform predefined tasks. The feedback was recorded for analysis. Over a period of five days, over 300 visitors dropped by to participate in the user feedback process. The first batch of Indic languages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux represents the efforts of the Red Hat internationalization team, and a second crop of languages is scheduled to be released and integrated by the end of 2005. As part of the Indic release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat has also released a set of Open Type fonts under the GNU GPL, named "Lohit" after the traditional name of the Brahmaputra river. http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/SRPMS/ttfonts-indic-1.6-1.src.rpm http://www.in.redhat.com

HOW SANTA NEARLY BROUGHT MICROSOFT DESKTOPS

Last year, Sinterklaas, the Dutch Santa Claus, was nearly outdone by his evil companion Zwarte-Piet ("Black Peter"). The bad news that broke during the pre-Christmas season concerned a five year contract worth about 150-200 million euros that the Dutch government had secretly negotiated with Microsoft. It appeared that the Association of Dutch Cities, VNG, had asked its members to permit negotiations concerning both desktop and server software between the Dutch Department of Justice and Microsoft on behalf of the local governments. The final draft was said to have set a price of 120 euros per desktop, for more than 260,000 machines. The VNG had argued that larger volumes would lower the price. While the disclosed documents talked about extending an existing contract, this was soon questioned in public: If cities and local governments not covered by the old contract were to join the contract it would have to be viewed as a new one. In this case, European rules mandate a public bid which had not taken place. Although the VNG argued "this does not change the full attention that open source software will receive for the medium and long term", Dutch members of Parliament like socialist Martijn van Dam saw parliament's open source ambitions greatly endangered (see also Issue 49, p13): "This action would k.o. open source for years and it completely ignores European rules for public bids. Additionally, the government would be binding itself to a single supplier. And that makes us vulnerable." Questions were asked in parliament, and public discussion showed that - if saving money was the prior argument - cheaper alternatives were readily available. As IT journalist and consultant Brenno de Winter states: "My research shows that Microsoft's 120 euros would be met by 75 euros (Sun), a maximum of 60 euros (Novell, without discount) or 4.55 euros (Linspire) per desktop and year, although not including migration costs." As of this writing, the contract with Microsoft had not been signed, and details were still to be sorted out. http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1034574,00.html

LEARN AND LOCALIZE OPEN SURCE

To avoid being an unpaid promoter of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Taiwan's Ministry of Education (MOE) announced that schools in Taiwan would be giving priority to open source software (OSS) for teaching and learning. The word was spread by Dr. Yao-Huang Kuo, Director of the Computer Center of MOE, at the 6th International Conference on Open Source (ICOS) held at the Institute of Information Science of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, December, 18 to 19, 2004. Apart from exploring the challenges and promises of OSS deployment in the educational sector, the conference, a famous gathering for the Taiwanese open source community, focused on localization. It was no coincidence that the ICOS organizers sent out an invitation to Patrick McGovern, the director of SourceForge.net. Cooperation and integration of Chinese OSS projects through the Open Foundry platform isn't as advanced as it was hoped for when it was started in 2003 with the aim of helping to integrate Chinese localization projects and to improve cooperation with other international OSS communities. Hence, Patrick was asked to share his experience in managing SourceForge.net with Open Foundry makers and users to help improve its contribution to localization and international collaboration. http://www.slat.org/icos/icos04 http://www.asia-oss.org

BELGIAN STUDENTS BUILD COMPUTER CLASS IN INDIA

What are you going to do when you're in your last year at high-school and have to choose a project? Five multimedia and communications technology students from the "Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen" college in Kortrijk, Belgium, thought of something that wouldn't end up as forgotten paperwork in a drawer. At the end of February, Elise Daans, Tim Bastiaenssens, Johan Van Loon, Joeri Balcaen and Jan Vansteenkiste will be flying to the Indian city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) to spend ten weeks at the Joseph Cardijn Technical School. There they will be building two Linux-based computer classes and teaching teachers and pupils how to use them. To fund their project, aptly named "LIndia", the students called for donations on their website, actively sought sponsorship and organized several fundraising events such as a LAN party and a Drum'n'Bass party. http://www.buitendezone.be/lindia/