Why Linux Makes Sense for India 336
Why Linux Makes Sense for India
Falling costs have made computers more affordable to a larger section of India's population. At the same time, the Internet has made the PC a compelling proposition for fulfilling communications, education, entertainment and information needs. Based on these two trends, the market for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is likely to take off significantly in India.
Yet, India faces a peculiar problem in that almost all popular operating systems and applications packages are available only in English, a language which is spoken by a mere ten percent of the population. The lack of "Indianized" software is therefore an issue that seriously hampers the growth of the Indian computer industry. For almost 915 million Indians, the lack of Indian language interfaces is one among many issues that hamper their ability to reap the benefits of information technology. This is creating a new class of people who live in what can be called as "Information Poverty" even as technology becomes cheaper and cheaper.
At the infrastructure level, the barriers to information access are dropping dramatically with new ISPs coming into India and several players jockeying to provide bandwidth and other back-end services. However, without operating systems, applications and Internet content in Indian languages, key benefits of the digital revolution-e-commerce, low cost communication through e-mail, access to information databases, telemedicine services etc are denied to the Indian masses. Giving Internet access to an Indian who does not know a shred of English is like giving someone the keys to a car when there are no roads to drive on!
One development that can help India out of this deadlock is a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages.
Linux is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify it to suit their own needs. Linux is a collaborative effort of thousands of programmers interacting over the Internet and is therefore not owned or controlled by any one company. In this article, we outline the economic and cultural imperatives for the localisation of Linux.
Free operating systems have several advantages for developing countries because most software packages today are developed in the west and then sold in developing countries where the parameters of affordability are completely different. The Bangladeshi activist Shahidul Alam expresses these differences poetically when he says, "A modem costs more than a cow." The benefits of free software multiply exponentially when we look at large-scale implementations. The Government of Mexico is estimated to have saved close to $125 million that would otherwise have been spent on proprietary systems when it signed up Red Hat to implement Linux in more than 140,000 schools and colleges across Mexico. In India too, large operators like World-Tel (which plans to have a thousand Internet Centres in Tamil Nadu, with each of them having between two to 20 PCs each) have expressed their intention to go the free software way. The company is negotiating similar deals with several other state governments. Organizations like World-Tel, Internet centres, schools and homes etc. can be expected to be significant users of Indian language operating systems.
The growth of content in platform-independent file formats (HTML, MP3 etc) has also reduced the dependence on a specific operating system, making Linux a viable option.
Apart from these, there are cultural reasons that make Linux attractive. The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh.
The openness of Linux (and other free operating systems like Free BSD) allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs.
It is therefore clear that Linux is a very attractive long-term solution to India's computing needs.
Localising the user interface of Linux to all the 18 official Indian languages will involve changing the menus and help-text to Indian languages and creating a whole stack of applications and tools (word processors, browsers, spell-checkers etc.) to enable computing in Indian languages.
This is a task that involves both technical and linguistic challenges. For example, should "File" simple be called "File" but written in Indian scripts because it is now a part of popular usage? Or should we find Indian language equivalents? In some cases it makes little sense. For example, how many people know that the Hindi word for computer is "sanghanak"? Or what is the Hindi equivalent for "Internet"? A very sensitive balance has to be struck between practicality and preserving Indian languages. However, Indian linguistic groups will have to wake up to the fact that their languages will become outdated if they do not become a part of the digital age. In fact, the Internet can be one of the finest means of recording, archiving and propagating Indian culture. Since culture is embedded in language to a significant degree, the ability to compute in one's native language can give Indian culture a significant boost.
However, one of the greatest roadblocks to computing in Indian languages has been the lack of widely accepted standards. If millions of people are able to freely e-mail each other, it is because of a widely accepted standard called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). It is sad that in spite of claims that India is a software superpower, we cannot harness IT for the benefit our own nation's citizens and the greatest stumbling block is a lack of agreement on standards. Check out ten different Hindi newspapers on the Web to see for yourself. You'll end up downloading and installing ten different fonts that (in most cases) can be used for browsing that one site and nothing else. It is because of this reason that Hindi, despite being one of the largest spoken languages in the world, has a negligible presence on the Web. Informed sources feel that the Unicode standard (which Microsoft has adopted for the upcoming Windows 2000 operating system) will soon become the de-facto standard settling the language standards issue once and for all. If this prediction comes to pass, it will significantly increase the domestic market for hardware, software and services, which is restricted only to a small fraction of India's population that understands English.
There are several initiatives that are underway in order to make this possible. The National Centre for Software Technology has submitted a proposal to the Technology Development in Indian Languages of the Government of India. TheIndian Institute of Technology, Madras has already started work on localising Linux to Malayalam and Tamil. My own institute, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore has committed resources to this the "IndLinux" project and started a collaborative effort to realise this goal. IndLinux has attracted the interest of organizations like FreeOS.com and many individuals located around the world.
In conclusion, it has to be said that the Indianisation of Linux is probably one of the most practical ways of making information technology available to millions and millions of Indians. It is now upto linguistic and technical groups to collaborate and make things happen.
-0-
Prof. Venkatesh Hariharan is with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. He can be reached at venky@iiitb.ac.in.
uh oh... pakistan won't like this (Score:1)
Re:differing paradigms (Score:2)
On the other hand, a magician would have a virtual bag of holding :)
the file and folder metaphor (Score:1)
But that's slightly beside the point: English has always been important as a unifying factor within the Indian nation, given the huge cultural and linguistic variations across the states. It's also meant that Indian programmers have been responsible for some highly significant work: whatever you think of MS, a glance at their credits list gives away the fact that a fair number of their developers come from the sub-continent.
What's important now is to gain leverage from this state of affairs: perhaps it would be useful for the big Linux vendors to start recruiting bilingual programmers to push on the development process. It should be a case of "English AND local language" rather than a XOR.
Menus aren't that important. . . (Score:1)
It isn't that difficult to learn enough English to be able to use English software. Instead, using computers and of course, the Internet, is a great way to learn English. Not knowing English means most of the content on the web is totally useless to you. Also, any non-english content on the web is totally useless for anyone who doesn't speak that specific language.
So, while I think it's vital that people can use their own languages so that they survive, you need to speak English to communicate with the rest of the world.
Re:Language, Software, Web, and Microsoft! (Score:1)
Mac OS 9: Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti (Score:1)
This, however, is only the first step: applications need localization, too.
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:1)
It will be the same in India. You need only port the system, apps and manuals. Programmers will do and learn what they have to to master their trade.
Indians do not need to learn English. They may not even need to learn to use computers. But once they use the new machines, they'll begin creating their own content, the same way all non-English-speaking nations have. Just seven short years ago it was impossible to find more than a handful of pages in any but a few Romance languages. Now look at it. Have you people visited, say, http://kr.yahoo.com/, lately? Or http://www.wanado.fr/?
Teaching English to the the poor and powerless is a mistake. I visited Ecuador a couple of years ago. One of my acquaintances there ran a program in a school for homeless children, teaching them English. They couldn't read. Couldn't do written math. They had little clothing. They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is English to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?
Re:Don't worry (Score:1)
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:1)
They need to learn to do written math, not speak English.
English is not the only answer. It may not even by AN answer.
[Regarding programming in other than English: programmers are learning English only to program, not to create "an open flow of English." They're certainly not learning it merely to browse the web.]
India has much bigger problems (Score:2)
Alright, the Indian population is estimated at close to a billion people. But this does not constitute a potential market of a billion people.
For starters, lets look at the literacy rate. Slightly more than the 50% of the Indian population are literate. where the Indian government defines being literate as the ability to read and write a letter.
Now lets look at affordability. About 30% of the people live around or below the poverty line - which is a hand-to-mouth existence. For such people, the basic necessities of life like food, clothing, and shelter are more of a priority than being able to surf the web.
And what about the infrastructure? Telecommunication quality in India sucks when compared to western standards. While I have never used a modem in India, I would not be surprised to hear that 28.8K speeds are the upper limit of what can be achieved over normal phone lines. High speed access is mostly a dream. The top-end educational and research institutes (one of which is where the good professor is located) do have high speed access - but we are talking about the common man - not the engineers who earn 10 times what the common man makes.
And last, but not least, lets look at the languages. The Sahitya Academy (the premier institute in India dealing with Indian literature) considers 21 languages worthy of study. These many language constitute a divisive force in getting things to work. It would be far better to improve the standard of education in English, since the people who cant afford to learn English would probably be the same people who cant afford to use the web.
In other words, while Prof. Hariharan may be right about free OS'es being most-suited for India (mainly due to economic reasons), it is wrong to think that it means a huge increase in the free-software community.
Files and Folders are not particularly western (Score:4)
Interesting that the author brings this up. I was recently reading about a very specific form of brain damage, caused by an operation to remove a tumor from the brain. A very small but highly focused amount of damage was done to a patient's language system:
He could name people.
He could name objects.
He could name cities.
He couldn't name a living animal. He would consistently mix up dog, cat, and any other term belonging to the family of "living animal".
If there's one thing linguists have found, it's that the core roots of language are not cultural--they're genetic. The base objects of communications--nouns, verbs, and so on--are by no means the only theoretical communication paradigms, but they're shared by every non-artificial human language.
You might wonder why I bring this up: In designing a method for interacting between a human and a computer, the properties of language are indeed important for establishing relationships. While there may not be literal files and literal folders in Indian culture, the concept of items existing within the branches of a tree is engrained deep within the structure of the human brain.
Now, "File" and "Folder" themselves are western analogies, to be sure. But there's a difference between recontextualizing an idiom and dismissing a natural paradigm.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
What is the state of i18n libs for Linux? (Score:1)
I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with internationalization issues with Linux.. how well established is Unicode and localization support on Linux? Are there web pages dedicated to it? How does one find out?
I know Java has support for internationalization and localization (Unicode + a system for using resource files for messages), but it still depends on having national fonts on the system it is installed on. Do any of the JDK ports for Linux come with a full set of Unicode fonts for XFree86? Does XFree86 itself have Unicode support?
Re:Yeah! (Score:1)
Re:A quiet revolution (Score:1)
Yes, but Indians are so frightfilly clever. Much smarter than us Americans, which is why we have to import Indian software engineers. Last I checked, NASA was 80% Indian or Chinese.
I think it's those superior Communist math textbooks that do it.
Re:Language Problems... (Score:1)
Re:India nees economic freedom more. (Score:1)
Re:language issue? (Score:1)
HunduFS (Score:2)
You mean nationalization, not internationalization (Score:2)
I love languages and I'm a great advocate of multi-linguism for everyone. Sharing a language brings people together so that the more languages people are taught in school or learn later on, the better they tend to get on with each other (unless politics has got to them first). Furthermore, the use of English on the Internet is a strong lever in the same direction of broad social understanding and cohesion.
In contrast, the "internationalization" of computing systems is a complete misnomer: it's really nationalizing them, in the original sense of the term, ie. giving them a national orientation. Of course one might argue that it helps those that know only the national language and no other, but that's precisely the point: they no longer need to gain an international viewpoint once that has been done. And that's not to mention the dark side, namely the benefit to those that seek advantage from nationalism, ie. the politicians and puppet masters.
This "internationalization" bandwagon is unstoppable, but alas it has disadvantages as well as the more obvious advantages. And don't believe that the promoters (I'm talking about politicians here) are all altruistic. Pigs don't fly, not even abroad.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm (Score:1)
Re: A quiet revolution (Score:3)
Also, because source is available to 99% of Linux apps, they're easily internationalized by Indian hackers and distros. Try that with Winamp or mIRC. KDE has a very nice internationalization framework in place, and console apps can use GNU gettext. Because Linux apps are often developed by non-US people, they tend to better address i18n issues than the Windows equivalents.
And this is the way the World is won... (Score:5)
China (slashdot story) [slashdot.org], Mexico (slashdot story) [slashdot.org], India... those are significant populations. It's a step in the right direction.
Remove language barriers: internationalize all parts of Linux.
Remove affordability barriers: release up-to-date packages that are designed to be useable on old 386 systems. In a lot of countries, Pentium are unaffordium.
Remove barriers to access: donate your old hardware to third-world countries. Help get Linux distributed -- donate a diskette-set to an emerging-world school.
Remove application barriers: internationalize applications. Identify what old software (running on DOS, Commodore, other old iron) should be ported to Linux.
Support the world outside of the little space you inhabit. Think outside the USA, think outside white Europe. Most of the world isn't like you. Look after them, and it'll pay back a hundredfold...
--
Hmmm (Score:1)
Re:Alternative directory trees? (Score:1)
Steven E. Ehrbar
i18n and l10n, where and when (Score:1)
> internationalize the source code?
Isn't i18n the process of designing programs to support several languages and currency/time/decimal notations and i10n the process of actually making changes for a specific language?
And I don't think code really should be localized. Coders will probably have to understand English to read documentation they need anyway and your average non English-speaking end user probably won't look at the code. I18n and l10n of programs and documentation is of much wider use at laest at the moment. Of course one could develop a translation engine that only translated the comments in source files
Oh. I would recommend that everyone started localization on documents about localization. That way as many people as possible can help.
-Late
It's called localisation, and should be available! (Score:2)
More importantly, why do so many people think that they should have the choice of using the Internet in their native language (which I'd guess is English for many people with this view), but that other people should not? Why don't you all learn written Chinese so *you* can benefit from an international outlook.
Just because English happens to be the language most used on the Internet does not mean that everyone should be forced to use it. In fact, I think it would do a lot of good to some anglophones to have to use another language occasionally.
On a practical note - for any Linux users who want a nicely internationalised + localised distribution - check out Mandrake 6.1 or later (7.0 is now downloadable). This has a great default setup that includes all the fonts required to surf to Japanese, Chinese, Korean and other sites using my normal Netscape 4.7 (English version). Even though I only know a few Chinese characters, it's great to at least be able to see the page and maybe send it to a friend who can read it (as an image attachment, no doubt...).
Mozilla (http://mozilla.org) has a great page on i18n and l10n, with some good resources.
US modems work fine in UK (Score:2)
The important issue is power supplies, which are always different (but a 110-240V supply will do fine, and suitable local adapters can usually be found), and telephone socket standards (there are literally tens of different ones... See http://www.teleadapt.com/ for examples).
Internal modems, probably ISA, are the best bet. As for the other hardware, any PC is better than none IMO - a 386 or above would be fine for browsing the Net with Lynx, or doing email, which is the key app for many people. However, a 486 or Pentium would be able to support a GUI better, allowing better internationalisation support normally.
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
Re:Language Problems... (Score:2)
We don't have to. The Indians can. They just need some support and coordination with the people who control the relevant code, such as glibc, mozilla, gnome, KDE, and so on. Making sure the language has a language code, that bidi-capable text widgets are used, and so on.
Re:A quiet revolution (Score:2)
Yes, but perhaps Linux could become that "easier path". India has a tremendous amount of intellectual capital and not much money. Linux could be a dream come true for them. The dev tools for building end user apps are already there ( namely, GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT ), and the Indian hackers have something that they can beat into shape. Perhaps beating Linux is easier for them in the long run than paying Windows licensing fees.
Linux might not be ready for home users yet, but perhaps it can start by taking the government desktops and the server market by storm.
Re:Indian English? (Score:1)
Re:India nees economic freedom more. (Score:1)
An opposing view. (Score:1)
English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible
Think about that. Twenty-four mutually-unintelligible languages in common use. English has become the standard language for all but local purposes in India, because there are far too many local tounges to try to translate between them.
Professor Hariharan's article states that only 10% of Indians speak English. According to the factbook, only 52% of Indians are literate, in any language. Assuming that the English speakers are a subset of the literate people, that means that roughly 20% of the literate population can understand English. That's the same as the percentage of Indians who speak the most common non-English language, Hindi.
It seems to me that what India needs is more literacy, and more English speakers. English has, for better or worse, become the most common language in international trade. (And, in India's case, intranational trade.)
I would certainly applaud the efforts of any people who choose to localize Linux, or any other software, to Indian languages. I do not think, however, that placing Indian computer users into a localized ghetto, separate from the rest of India and the rest of the world, will prove to be the means that the "digital revolution" will be brought to that country.
This is especially the case if, as Professor Hariharan implies, an Indian-localized system would remove such commonly-used concepts as "files" and "folders". Does he envision a system based on "mud huts" and "clay slabs"? (And would any intelligent Indian react with anything other than offense to such a translation which assumes he is not intelligent enough to understand the original system?) Or does he rather imagine replacing the entire concept of a hierarchical directory structure with something else? If the latter, what possible purpose is served by making the systems used by Indians radically different than those used by the remainder of the world?
While this article makes a valid point in that more localized versions of Linux (or any software!) is a good thing, I feel that it far overstates its case and misses the point.
-Damien
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
A knowledge of Latin used to be mandatory for educated Europeans and Americans. It was the lingua franca of its day. It is still useful for some professions. German had a similar standing in chemistry.
The reality is that you need to be able to communicate with people in other countries. Today, the most useful language is English. Tomorrow, who knows. Don't confuse practicality with colonialism.
Many of my coworkers are Chinese, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese. Their only common language is English.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:1)
I don't work in the field of machine translation, but I'm guessing that an important first step is to invent a sufficiently rich interlingua so that you can do something like EnglishinterlinguaHindi or EnglishinterlinguaTamil. One benefit of an interlingua would be that adding a new language would be an O(1) operation rather than O(N), where you already have N languages. Another is that it centralizes many assumptions in one place, where they can be better subjected to scrutiny and peer review.
An open-source translator would be an excellent thing. It would be a boon for Internet access to many people throughout the world who would otherwise miss out.
BTW, I got 2/3 of the way thru your post before I learned that you weren't a native English speaker, and that only because you specifically mentioned it.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:1)
Erm, uhhh, whuh? (Score:1)
all poor people are lazy and deserve to be killed
That's a disgusting overgeneralization. I have certainly advocated wounding the poor on more than one occasion, but never killing them . . . unless they're driving slowly in the left lane, of course, but that's a capital crime when anybody does it.
Nice troll, by the way. Not bad at all. It took me a minute to grok.
Re:I don't get your point ... (Score:1)
Now, this has nothing to do with whether or not german->english is harder than english->one of 18 indian languages, but that there is a fsck load of stuff to translate, and it'll be quite a project. Even then, there will more than likely be remnants of the english documentation.
On the other hand, India has a huge population, probably bigger than the US and Europe combined (but I don't know the population of Europe, so I might have just shoved my foot down my throat), which would mean they have plenty of people to support their own Open Source culture, but that doesn't mean we can't all help each other ;). So, it is a big project, but they have the man power. What we need to do is make sure our apps are translation friendly.
Jeff
But if the content isn't in an Indian language... (Score:2)
How many different languages are spoken in India? Is it more? How prolific are the differnt languages? And what happens when you get a native language operating system out to a population who than can then understand less than 1% of all web content. Sure, there are a lot of purty graphics, but it's the text, man! I guess the question applies to more than just India, but all non-English speaking countries trying to break in to the Internet.
Maybe someone could develop a "Learn English for Web Browsing" site in multiple languages... but then again after taking years of Spanish in high school and college (which I promptly forgot) I don't think I could learn it from a web site.
Ah, screw it, lets just internationalize the stuff and see what happens. Worst case scenario: using their new found informational power India takes over the world (and the web) and I can't understand any of the content... :)
Got a web site? Want to know if it's up? Try @watch [atwatch.com] for free!
Re:A quiet revolution (Score:3)
Re:language issue? (Score:1)
and with win2000 and office 2000, you can even do all this with an ordinary English version of windows. i checked it out, my girlfriend (who is chinese) could finally write chinese on my computer WITHOUT those icky addon programs she needed before.
In Linux, there is still a far way to go. OK, for example, if you use (X)Emacs with MULE and LaTeX, you can also write foreign language texts rather easy. But the rest? Especially if it's about multibyte character sets i'd guess it's a total mess.
Re:Yeah! (Score:1)
How to combat this?
Re:Just one thing..... (Score:2)
There are problems at all levels of society that need to be addressed simultaneously. You don't just ignore group A to help group B, just because group A has their essential needs met.
Furthermore, better IT access enables the economy to grow. The taxes collected during a growing economy can be used to address the problems you mentioned.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:4)
This brings up a good point: do you internationalize the source code?
Seriously, think about it: the free software movement is all about bringing access to source code and the ability to modify that source code.
Do you internationlize the source (meaning comments, variable and function names, etc.)?
I think for the sake of complying with the open source movement, I think maybe it needs to be discussed and thought about.
The problem that becomes classic is that international versions of programs tend to be much further behind than current, U.S./English versions. It would be even more so if you decided to internationalize the source code, because while the original source is very much English, international versions would need to be translated.
It would be an interesting discussion. Maybe an Ask Slashdot forum would be appropriate?
Common mistake in reasoning (Score:2)
When Linux is embedded in kiosks and handhelds with handwriting input, the user is not really "using Linux" or "computing" - they are just communicating. While the language used to print assembly docs for the Boeing 737 are in English, a large proportion of the people flying Indian Airlines' 737's are neither airplane mechanics nor
aeronautical engineers.
Yes, the Information Economy is where it's at - however it is not necessary for the whole population to be "computer literate" to be "computer users" and gain the benefits of the Information Economy.
The last farmer in India will be "computer literate" about the same time that the last homeless person on the streets of San Francisco becomes computer literate. In other words there will be (for a long time) people at the other end of the Information continuum that will not get immediate benefits.
It is a common mistake in reasoning (often seen on Slashdot and other forums) to assume all Linux users are or need to be programmers. An ATM user uses computers and is part of the Information Economy without necessarily being a computer programmer or even what we call a "computer user"
In fact the future success of Linux and of computing lies in making it ubiquitous so that people everywhere use it and it works and they don't want or need to know what lies underneath.
Only a small fraction of the population needs to understand English, computer programming and Linux before Linux is everywhere. So let's focus on achievable goals closer to reality than to keep putting out the absurd requirement that 900+ million people in India need to learn English first before they are able to get the benefits of Linux.
I would be quite impressed if the 200+ million people in the US all learned English and computer programming and yet a good proportion of them are beneficiaries of the Information Economy.
Nitin Borwankar,
CEO and President,
Borwankar Research Inc.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:2)
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:4)
Linux Internationalisation Initiative (Score:2)
but it's worth looking into it.
http://www.li18nux.org/ [li18nux.org]
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:2)
While I agree that the world would be better if everybody spoke the same language, I also think that this is never going to happen. Even if it was, I don't think that "locking out" potential users from using a computer by not translating programs is the right way to go. This just makes the language barrier even worse - many people would love to learn English well, but they may not be able to do it for various reasons. My parents, for example, don't understand English very well (they learned it in school in the 50ies) and speak it even worse - but that's not going to change. For old people (over 45-50), a language is hard to learn. Some say that the ability to easily learn a language is already decreasing in the age of 10 to 15 - this is why we learn languages early in school.
Then think about countries as the former USSR and the other former communist countries, where English wasn't even an option at school. How much of this population grew up under this era and have trouble with English? Well, one could guess that that would be the majority.
And even in countries where English is learned as a second language in school, the quality of the education may differ. I have a cousin in Germany, and I once visited his school and sat by during their English class. My opinion was that even I spoke English better than their teacher, and English isn't my first language either. My cousin and his friends shared this opinion =)
These are some of my arguments why I translate programs:
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:5)
Internationalization of comments? This would indeed be useful to the non-English world, but I don't think that it's a high-priority thing.
Many source code comments are not even understandeable by other people than who wrote them, and since the source may change very often (but not necessarily the UI) it would be hard to keep up. This goes also for function and variable names. Translation of these could also very easily break things.
Not saying that there isn't translation of programming languages out there - an example that comes to mind is the macro language (VBA?) in MS Office applications that is translated (function calls etc.) in localized versions. However, I don't understand the point in this - most programmers or other computer-savvy people in the world know English well enough to be able to read the name (!) of a function call in the documentation and use it. Again, it's the documentation that should be translated, not the function calls, variable names, etc, where translation could break things.
I'm translating programs myself (GNU utilities into Swedish) and there's a reason why we (translators) have a strict policy not to translate such things as command-line switches. This would break things. So "--verbose" should be left intact in the translated strings, no matter if it is Hindi, Swahili, Esperanto, Dutch or Swedish. But the explaination of "--verbose" in "--help", and the documentation, is translated.
To sum things up: Since many wonderful programs lack proper UI translation in many languages (not to mention the documentation!), I think this is where the main efforts should be concentrated.
Also, internationalization is more than just translation. For example, I'd love to have more applications understand localization settings and properly react to them - I hate when an application defaults to inches as a measure, weeks beginning on Sundays, Legal as the paper format, AM/PM clock, "," as thousand delimiter, etc, etc. All things that are NOT the "standard" outside the USA, and things that many programmers overlook. Even worse is when these annoying things are hard-coded - it goes from being merely annoying to a chronic pain, and often makes me refuse to use the program at all.
So even if programs are translated, there's still more left to do to make it internationalized.
Re:Just one thing..... (Score:2)
Linux helps unindustrialized countries develop their own infrastracture, without going into debt to foreign corporations.
(And geez man, get an education. You seem to think India is some big shanty town. It's the largest democracy in the world and its software industry is huge, probably second to the US).
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:5)
Just my 0.02 Euro here.
I'm Italian, and I live in Italy. I'm just a C/C++ programmer like many others. The source code I write has all the comments and symbols names in English. This mainly for 2 reasons:
1) Technical language: programming needs a whole new class of technical terms. Simple words like `formatting', `font', etc. didn't have equivalents in Italian when they were introduced to the mass in the former '80. Simply, we adopted (and distorted) the usual English words. Attempts to create a brand new tech gerg just failed. After 20 years the mass starts using the Italian form for "directory", but still it's a minorty. Just figure yourself when it comes to source code...
2) Technical documentation: good technical documentation is written in English. Programmers like me avoid translations, just because they make life more complex (the effort is doubled: first you read it, then you try to figure out how the terms used are related to the well known English terms). I'm translating the GNU Emacs manual in Italian in my spare time, and it's a damn difficult work (and it's not at all about programming - figure it yourself when it comes to programming books).
3) I18n: English is good for symbol names, just because you don't have to do with accents. Italian words just look ugly without accents, and using ISO-8859-1 is still not a viable option for sources...
4) Last but not least: English is the de facto `lingua franca' for programmers, just like Latin was for the europeans in the passed ages. If you start writing your sources using one of the 18 languages of India for comments and symbol names, probabilities are that only indians will ever peek into them, just taking out the rest of the world. And since most people giving help and advice on programming out there speak English well enough to make one understand them (perhaps except Alan Cox, sometimes
Of course, I just use Italian in every other context, just like everyone else...
I hope this is a bit clarifying.
Don't worry (Score:2)
I would expect the local value of a cow to be much smaller in a place where cows are traditionally not eaten [hindubooks.org]. I'd rather see a comparison made to something that is more universally consumed and valued, such as wheat. And don't forget to throw in some comparisons to countries like Israel where computer parts are heavily taxed in a (still) war-time economy.
[Don't mind the links -- Slashdot is munging some perfectly good code, again. Maybe the urls are just too big?...]
There are no socialist countries; India is Red. (Score:2)
-russ
p.s. Read any Indian newspaper, or read India Today if you want to see how Marxist India remains. For example, university tenure committees are full of Marxists; to get tenure you must espouse Marxist (that is, Nonsense) economics.
Other way around, Sig. (Score:2)
-russ
It's been tried already (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Worse off for it? (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Worse off for it? (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Worse off for it? (Score:2)
And yes, the entrepreneurs who can get megabucks have often had to prove themselves. How else would you expect them to get the money to pay the workers to solve the problem to make more money?
As far as loans to small-scale entrepreneurs goes, just look at the Grameen bank.
-russ
Re:Worse off for it? (Score:2)
-russ
India nees economic freedom more. (Score:3)
-russ
Re:A modem costs more than a cow. (Score:2)
This is an incredibly good idea. The only problem I'd foresee is the shipping, and assuming
sponsorship by an international shipper (say, DHL) that could be solved, too. Might be very
good PR for DHL in India to be the source of free US surplus modems.
JMR
Re:Just one thing..... (Score:3)
Look in your back yard: the interstate highway system in the US was built when the US economy was doing rather poorly; yet it stimulated growth and development. What exactly was California before the coast-to-coast rail lines were built? Definitely not the 7th largest economy in the world...
That is what creates wealth: Free Trade, Free Speech. Just imagine how irrelevant the US would be in the world today without proper telecomm and transportation infrastructure. After all, America (OK, Australia too) is the only non-contiguous land mass on this planet.
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
ass/u/me(ptions) (Score:2)
As many others have said, and as I will word (only slightly differently):
Why should you assume the same thing would work for up and coming Indian computer geeks?
What you begin with is what you will be familiar with. I, unfortunately, had my start with Windows, and I therefore seem to know more about what I'm doing while using Windows as opposed to Linux. I wish I had had a start on another OS so I could be more familiar with something more worthwhile.
It's the same with innumerable other things in life.. say, language. The language you grow up hearing/speaking/etc. will be the one you are most comfortable with (AFAIK). I grew up on English, hence, I'm better at it than I am at the foreign languages I'm studying in school now.
I conclude by saying this: You were truly thinking in the spirit of a Westerner
"The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume
why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh. "
when you made your statement because you were assuming that Windows would be a better transition for the Indians. The whole point of the article is that the Indians haven't had access to computers/an OS yet! Therefore, they need something that will work for them/be cheap/be configureable for them... Linux!
A modem costs more than a cow. (Score:3)
We need a modem bank where we can donate old modems, too slow for American lines, but just right for old infrastructure.
George
India / China interesting cases (Score:2)
socialist countries can be rich ... (Score:2)
Some Statistics about India (Score:3)
1 billion people
66 % literacy rate
20 Major/Different languages with 1000s of dialects each
30 % of the country can speak Hindi
10 % can speak, read and write English
Official Govt language Hindi, however actual Government Language is English - nearly all communication from the government is in local language and English !
Home PC Penetration; a few million.
ISP and internet connections extremely affordable
especially for students.
Did I miss anything ?
Language Problems... (Score:2)
Mind you - it's still better than users being novices in both Linux and English.
What about coding? (Score:2)
What do you call ... (Score:2)
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who knows 2 languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who knows 1 language?
American.
LOW ISP rates? (Score:2)
My cousin in Bangalore can chat with my Dad in California, USA, instead of paying out the nose for telecom rates. The only reason it's cheaper, AFAIK, is because there are now MULTIPLE ISPs in the country!
Geez, one ISP servicing an area the size of half the US, and not nearly as well-wired (i.e., quality of wiring)....think how the characters on UserFriendly would do....(-;
Right on! Corruption is a *big* problem. (Score:2)
Bureaucrats' wages are low; it's accepted and expected that they will compensate for those low wages via bribes. And, for anyone who's studied political science, remember that this is less a rational-legal relationship than a traditional one (in the Weberian sense) -- there are patron-client dyads everywhere, which are diffuse relationships, not limited ones.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:2)
There's a problem with that. A variable or function has a name. The whole point of internationalization is to allow a program to dynamically look up message text at run-time for the user's language. That doesn't make a great deal of sense for a static part of the program, the source code.
However, I can see two ways in which your question, if not taken literally, is useful. First, there is good reason to internationalize programming tools. There's nothing wrong with the idea that gcc should be able to handle comments and literals in any language. Identifiers present a more difficult problem because the code may be compiled on a system that doesn't have the original programmer's locale. Thus, the set of valid characters for identifiers should not depend on the locale. For that matter, neither should the valid set of characters anywhere else in the code.
The other useful interpretation of this question is the obvious one that there is a need for documentation that can make the internals of the code clear to a non-English-speaking audience. Certainly, English is the language of programming. Any project in which programmers can't communicate with each other is likely to fragment. But that is no reason that a team of programmers sharing some non-English common language should not be able to read the system header files for example.
Re:Port Indians to English... (Score:2)
Yes, I know this was a joke. I did laugh. But I wanted to raise a point that isn't always obvious to monolingual English speakers.
I'm the team leader for the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project [umontreal.ca]. Esperanto is unusual among languages. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single monolingual Esperantist anywhere in the world, nor is there likely to be one any time soon. We have no native country as a language and aren't seeking one. For anyone who is confused by this, Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1887. It is usually learned as a second, third or subsequent language.
Everyone on the Esperanto Translation Team could be using free software under other languages for which the localization has already been done. I use Linux with English literals except when I an validating translations. But there is a reason to have complete locales for any language that users might want to use software in conjunction with. I can read English just fine, but when I want to write to a non-English-speaking friend in Esperanto, I need an e-mail client that can handle the character set. And when I am writing in Esperanto, it takes me a moment to switch back and forth. I don't do it instantly. Having messages, menus, etc., in the same language I am working in is a great help.
Teaching the entire world a single common language will not eliminate the need for computing environments that support their native languages. The only thing that would accomplish that would be if we all learned a single language and abandoned all others. That would involve abandoning names, literature, culture. It isn't a step many people are willing to take. Certainly, teach the world English, or French, German, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, Esperanto or any other language. Don't ask them all to give up the perfectly good languages they already have.
The Free Translation Project (Score:3)
This is not the only project handling translation of free software. Several of the distributions have projects going to translate their installation tools and documentation. And both Gnome and KDE have internationalization projects.
IE does support multiple character sets in a page (Score:2)
For example, view http://www.servlets.com/servlet/HelloRosetta via IE5/Win2000.
Mozilla is probably the only open-source app that has the right architecture to support localization and i18n. For instance, Mozilla stores language resources as XML entities, making them easy to localize. Very nice solution IMHO.
Both the Windows and Java API's have significant support for i18n and l18n, such as full support for various character encodings, support for resource files builtin, Collation (being able to do String comparisons and sorting on non-English languages), Time, Date, Metric, and Money formating, etc.
The big problem with Linux and l8n/i18n.... (Score:2)
is not the kernel and device drivers supporting it (which they do), but the fact that there isn't an easy to use, widely adopted API for locating language resource strings. In userland, thousands of GNU utilities and scripts shipped with Linux all have hardcoded English language strings in them.
Thus, for any company that wants to create a "RwandaLinux", not only do they have to translate documentation, but they must hire programmers (not writers) who can translate embedded strings in the thousands of userland utilities that ship with typical Linux distributions, and that is a monumental task.
In addition to translating them, they must make sure they are kept up to date with their English counterparts.
None of this is going to change until programmers stop writing code like
printf("The task completed successfully.")
and
if(!strcmp(argv[c], "-delete"))
and start writing code like
printf(getResource(TASK_COMPLETION_MESSAGE));
if(!strcmp(argv[c], getResource(CMDLINE_OPTION_DELETE))
When that happens, there will be no need to keep localized versions "up to date" with the newest CVS trees, but the program text will be separated from the logic.
Re:India / China interesting cases (Score:2)
The article mentioned 10% as able to read English. What percentage of the population are literate, yet cannot read English? I'm not disagreeing that a customized interface using the prevelant language is desirable. I'm just curious about the numbers? How many people can read Hindi but cannot read English?
Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking to filter what the eyes see and what the ears hear
Actually... (Score:2)
And when you get right down to it, if you preload NT or 95/98 to require a password and you preload a Linux box to start in init 5 with gnome/gdm, your average new user would undoubtedly have exactly the same level of difficulty learning either.
Re:French is International? (Score:2)
When I got my passport about 15 years ago, it listed everything in English and French. When I asked why, I was told that "French was the official international language". It could be that it's not "official" any more, but at the passport office at least, there is still some French momentum.
--
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
No, answers like yours show how far away India is from become a world-dominant country.
When Asian countries wanted to grow their economies, did they whine that everyone wouldn't learn Asian languages? No, they learned English because they realized that international business is conducted in English.
If you want to produce Indian-language content for Indian-language people, go right ahead. But to argue that the Indian people should be closed off from the world's information until the world's information is translated is just stupid.
--
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
Who is talking about civilizing? That's your own bigotry and prejudice speaking.
I'm talking about growing your economy, and bringing your country out of starvation. Wouldn't it be nice if your farmers could read the latest agricultural journals? Oh wait, they better wait until they're translated.
International business is conducted in English. Should the average citizen have the opportunity to engage in international business, or should that only be reserved for the Elite who can afford to become fluent in English?
And if you haven't noticed, most of the information on the web is in English. Is this information only "appropriate" for the rich in India? Are they only to learn "outside" information that the Elite (or the government) deems appropriate to translate?
Yes, it's easy to say "if they need it, they'll learn it", and this argument might even fly in richer countries, but something tells me that India doesn't have quite the same infrastructure for the poorest citizens to be able to access English tutoring.
Once a citizen knows English, and has access to a computer in a library, even the poorest individual has access to much of the knowledge of the world. That citizen can bypass "approved" translations (which might or might not be accurate).
--
Re:Knowing only 1 language is living with 1 eye op (Score:2)
You'll notice that I said "as a second language".
I agree that it's enriching to learn other languages, but the reason that most of the world speaks (and is taught) multiple languages is practicality. English is the international language, so it makes sense for someone who speaks non-English to learn the "standard" language. In the US, we already speak the "standard" language, so there is no great incentive to learn another one, except for cultural purposes (as you point out).
--
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
First of all, programming is not done in Asian languages, because there is no computer language that uses an Asian language (Is there an Chinese symbol for 'printf'?). Moving past the obvious to your argument about learning English...
You could make EXACTLY the same argument about education in general... "They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is education to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?"
The point of education is to give people the tools to raise themselves above their standing. Maybe if that shoeshine guy knew English, he could study the innumerable amount of information on the web in order to learn a better skill. Or heck, the person could order any number of textbooks (how many are printed in his particular dialect?) He would be able to read CNN to get accurate information about his government in order to help affect change.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that the needs never end. Yes, yet more money could be spent on food and shelter, but this is not a long term solution, because you've done nothing to make the people self sufficient. There simply is not enough resources (in ANY country) to take care of every individual. You have to give each individual an opportunity to better themselves through hard work. And that opporunity begins with an open flow of information.
--
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
Er, I never said that English should be taught to the exclusion of all other education. Obviously that would be absurd.
--
Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:3)
First let me say that I understand the need for computers that work in native languages.
But, it seems as if much of the point of essay is to improving the Indian economy and help them get "plugged in" to the world. If that's the goal, then it's much more important to change the education infrastructure so that the majority of the population learns English as a second language.
As the professor himself points out, most of the web is in English. Once Indians are on the web, they will still be limited in the information that they can use. Imagine the effect of citizens being able to access all the information of the web, not just information that originates in India (or is written in an Indian language).
English is the standard international language of the world (Yes, I know French is "officially" the international language, but... that's a joke). For any country that wants to break out of "third world" status, a population fluent in English is absolutely critical.
--
Re:Teaching English would be much more valuable (Score:2)
The sooner Westerners realise that they are a small minority and that the first two letters of WWW mean World-Wide, the better. Posts like this just show how far away that eventuality is.
Just one thing..... (Score:3)
Language, Software, Web, and Microsoft! (Score:4)
Many of the points above are shared with other non-Western languages (lack of a single standard character set, the issue of linguitics, user interface, ...etc.)
Here in the Middle East, we face a strikingly similar set of problems, with some added bonus. People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to this Times article [pathfinder.com]), making it the Fifth language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.
Arabic is unique in that it needs the peripherals (the VT100 terminal and the printer) to support automatic contextual character shaping on the fly, and Right-to-Left orientation. It shares these qualities with other Semitic language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Nabatean). So, a character set and a font is not enough, like the case in most western language.
Several years ago, there were lots of character sets, each in use by a different hardware vendor, and even many vendors had several character sets. A standard (called ASMO-708) emerged, and was adopted by almost all vendors using ASCII (IBM was EBCDIC, so they were different).
In the early 1990s, a company called Al Alamia [sakhr.com] developed a version of Microsoft Windows 3.x that supports many character sets, including ASMO-708. Microsoft hired (read stole!) the main developer from Al Alamia, there was a law suit.
When Windows 95 came, the battle was won (by MS!) in the Arabic arena.
When the web arrived, things got even worse (from a standard point of view) and a Netscape version (called Sindbad) was developed by Sakhr to navigate the web in Arabic, and lately released it as a plug-in to Navigator 4.x. It is terribly slow though. Microsoft won the browser wars, and virtually all the Arabic users are now using Windows 95/98/NT with MS Internet Explorer. New development of Arabic web pages is almost done entirely for MS Internet Explorer. Not good!
Dynamic fonts are great and are used by a few sites. They work great with MS IE or NS Navigator, but are not widely used.
So, where does this leave Linux? There are:
- No arabized GUI for Linux at all, which makes me still use a dual boot to get Arabic.
- No good arabized browsers under Linux either.
- Microsoft is gaining a virtual monopoly on a whole culture of 22 or so countries!
I am still using Netscape for e-mail and browsing (even on Windows, and fed up with its problems!), but have to use MS IE for browsing Arabic web pages! Sad!I have some links on Arabic [baheyeldin.com] on the web (scroll to the bottom of the page on what is available for Arabic on the net.
--
Have you checked out Muslim Investor [muslim-investor.com]?
PR People (Score:2)
"Linux, the official OS of the largest democracy in the world. Get yours today."
Localization is (Score:2)
I think most would agree that while English remains the de-facto language of technology, a great need for locale support exists.
Many disciplines benefit from contributors who do not speak or read English. Mathematics comes immediately to mind; a significant portion of development in pure mathematic research stems from Russian speaking scientists. I'd hate to think how many advances would be lost to that community if support for that paticular locale wasn't widely available.
Open Source software definitely provides the best avenue for international support - reference the support of the Finnish government for Linux for educational use over Windows due to Microsoft's unwillingness to provide them with the proper langauge support.
Providing non-English speaking developers the power to support their local language is a prime reason for the power and popularity of Open Source. Diversity is often a Good Thing(TM). Open Source empowers that diversity in a big way.
Re:And this is the way the World is won... (Score:2)
Most of the world does not speak English and is perfectly happy with their local language. The Japanese part of the Internet is doing quite well without English, thank you. This is the only place I have lived besides the U.S. and I can clearly say that even though studying English is a popular hobby here, 99% of all communications in the .jp name space are in Japanese. All of our 6 monthly Linux magazines are in Japanese. There are more Linux books in Japanese than I can keep track of. AFAIK most of the O'Reilly books have been translated as well.
If people did not "waste time internationalizing," only the people who want to spend time going through the work of reading in another language could enjoy the Internet. My mother in law, who is in her late 50's, really dislikes reading English, but thanks to localized OS' and software she can send and recieve email in Japanese from everyone in the family.
just because it was easy for you to learn English does not mean it is easy for everyone else.
Problems I have with this essay (Score:2)
Coin some new terms, add the words MP3, Linux and opensource (okay he didn't say it but I'm generalizing), connect them with some yarn and scotch tape and you've got a cool new Slashdot- approved infomative essay.
"Yet, India faces a peculiar problem in that almost all popular operating systems and applications packages are available only in English, a language which is spoken by a mere ten percent of the population."
(Let's not forget to mention that we are actually dealing with 42% of the population, 52% of india is literate, and it's a safe bet that all 10% who speak english are literate)
Virtually all high school educated people in india (=those who have enough money to buy a computer) have enough command of the english languge to use software, understand help bubbles etc. I am not saying that a high scool education should be a pre-req for using a computer; however a massive xlation project would cause too many splits; and not return on the money it would take to maintain and produce indian versions of all sorts of software (you realize how much there is? who deicdes what GPL software gets xlated?) and to maintain all the fun compatability issues that will happen.
"One development that can help India out of this deadlock is a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages."
Localise linux? Localizing the kernel and device drivers wouldn't do much good IMHO. Oh wait you mean all the software available for linux (most of it which it intended to run on many different unicies)?? Oh I get it...so you plan on xlating all GPL utilies (ssh, ls, mv, cron), their input and output file formats, display information, KDE, GNOME, all software documentation (what good is software if you don't know how to use it), error messages?...and keep up with anything that joe blow releases under GPL? The above proposal is just catagorically wrong.
"Linux is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify it to suit their own needs."
While Linux's development grwoth has stemmed from kernel hackers modifying linux at the base; it "phenomenal popularity" has nothing to do with it. Linux is a stable, free UNIX; one can run all sorts of wonderful wide-spread UNIX stuff on it, and use it as a solid server; that's why it is popular. In general, users do not modify linux beyond any other OS, changing drivers, installing libraries and applications, and system settings; everybody does this with every OS.
"The growth of content in platform-independent file formats (HTML, MP3 etc) has also reduced the dependence on a specific operating system, making Linux a viable option."
I can't think of any widely used content before html (really platform independant?) that was OS dependant. ASCII, UNICODE, gif, wav, jpg, etc. Linux is no more or less viable due to the fact that we are using platform independant content...we have generally always been. Application independant is another story, which would definately point to a negative for linux (for tools that would be in most general use wp's, spreadsheets, database creation tools etc...)
"The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh. "
Well assuming that the complaint is about the graphical representation of the underlying OS representation of files n' directories (which is the same as linux) under the Windows shell...under a graphical desktop environment (KDE/GNOME) of linux, they are represented the same way. And anyone could write a shell for either OS that pictured directories as books and pages or whatever...
"The openness of Linux (and other free operating systems like Free BSD) allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs."
The abstraction level at which UI software as described is as easily implimented under ,say, windows as linux. In terms of development, the UI really doesn't have much to do with the OS as any other application...linux isn't any more or less easily localizeable than any other OS.
I won't even get into cost issues, besides the fact that it is debatable...
To me, the article is just another "be cool, say linux" essay clone...but hell it might be a good a way of getting the government to get scared of not being cool and to pump some money in which can help some people. I suppose the only practical solution is to invest in language xlation research and come up with a good translator for the non-english readers.
Re:Yeah! (Score:3)
You want India, it's yours. Most of them can't afford Windows 2000 licensing anyway. Of course, neither can the Americans, but we'll deal with that at a later point.
Have fun taking over a little insignificant country. Maybe I'll let you nuts open source mars... hmmph.
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
Port Indians to English... (Score:4)
Sure, they're not very portable, but with a little re-programming, they will even be able to get onto the internet. In addition, not only will they benefit from [cough]Open Source, but then they'll be able to use my wonderful Windows Products in English.
It will save a lot of work for my programmers, to not have to port Windows to another language, and they can use the free time to implement some other features I've been wanting. Security, stability, are a couple of features I've heard good things about. Platform independance sounds kinda neat, for hardware anyway...
Regardless, it is very important that you cease your efforts to port Linux to Indian languages, but rather port Indians to English..
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
(Score 5, Monopoly)
Have you tried my newest software? Microsoft.com [microsoft.com]
Local programming languages (Score:2)
Obviously, all programming languages today are a subset of english with some punctuational and structual differences. A non-english speaking (reading) person confronted with a totally non-english computer environment will surely not have that much incentive learning english (not at least to operate his computer).
This way, if the person in question want to program his computer, how will he be able to do that ? Why not port C to punjabi ? it should be a matter of patching gcc, now wouldn't it ? This is just so cool!
Re:India / China interesting cases (Score:3)
Also, just about any language can be written in roman characters. Take Chinese for examplewo mei you wenti, ne kan ma?
The first Operating System to have good support for a non-romaniform language will be a big step in the history of computers,
Wow, you're way behind the times then, aren't you? From where I'm sitting windows supports non-romaniform languages perfectly well. Take Chinese for example: ÎÒ ÃÓÐ ÎÊÌâ, Äã Âí? If your running m13 (with the Chinese character set) you should be able to see that (IE5 supports unicode input, but not multiple character sets in one page mozilla does. But I don't know what slash is doing ether), maybe. I could also write in Japanese, Arabic, Korean, or anything else I felt like. I don't know where Linux is in this capability, but windows is already there.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
Be careful (Score:2)
Although many deny it, English dominates the languages of the world in terms of the power wielded by English-language speakers. I respect, and am, in fact, facinated by non-English languages. However, while Hindi support is definatly a plus for Linux, we need to keep in mind that the end goal is to open the possibility of communications between everyone, not one single group.