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Richard Stallman on Kerela's desktop Linux adoption (DesktopLinux.com)
DesktopLinux.com
interviews Richard Stallman about the migration to Linux in
India's Kerela state schools.
"Q: Was it difficult to convince them to make the change, or were they already leaning in that direction?
A:The previous government gave lukewarm support to free software; they began a partial migration, but had not made a firm decision to take it all the way. FSF India has worked for several years with both the main parties, and won the firm support of the (then) opposition leader. He is now the chief minister (equivalent to the governor of a state in the U.S.), and we both spoke at a free software event in Trivandrum two weeks ago. So I think the FSF India people deserve some of the credit for building the support that made this decision happen."
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Spelling? Posted Sep 7, 2006 20:50 UTC (Thu) by kmike (guest, #5260) [Link] I always thought it's Kerala, not Kerela, but what do I know...
Spelling? Posted Sep 7, 2006 22:47 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] It appears that you are correct; Google asks "Did you mean: Kerala" in response to searches for Kerela.
Richard Stallman on Kerala's Linux adoption Posted Sep 8, 2006 0:07 UTC (Fri) by gnu (subscriber, #65) [Link] Here, this makes good reading
http://puggy.symonds.net/~fsug-kochi/mass-memo.html
Hardly a sudden forced migration... Posted Sep 11, 2006 9:42 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] > FSF India has worked for several years with both the main parties ...> ... They have made their own distro, emphasizing support for > Malayalam (the language of Kerala)... > ... a way to begin moving Kerala's colleges to free software ... > ... I suggested that the government set a policy of only paying > for computers that won't use proprietary software. This puts paid to some of the opinions prematurely expressed when the change was first mentioned here less than two weeks ago. http://lwn.net/Articles/197824/ People are unlikely to post to LWN without informing themselves if there is clear information readily available in English. When the details are any further than a web search away, we seem to get lazy. AFAICT (by a brief web search), Microsoft's Malayalam Language Interface Pack for Windows XP has only been available to the public since February 2006, despite having been promised for over three years, and occasionally mentioned in documentation as though it was already released. In the meantime Kerala schools have been stuck with the ageing Windows 98. While FSF India have been lobbying both Congress and Communist parties in Kerala to adopt free software instead for longer still. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1404928.cms Rendering support in for Indic fonts in free software has been available for a long time, but no serious localisation efforts or free fonts seem to have existed prior to Stallman's visit to Kerala in 2001 and Gates' to New Delhi the next year. http://lwn.net/2001/0726/a/rms-india.php3 http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/nov02/11-12... I've tried to find dates for proper Malayalam localisation in free desktop software, but most of the links I find are forward-looking announcements. GNOME seems a long way ahead of KDE, but the translation stats don't look too impressive even now. I suppose the most up-to-date information isn't in English at all. http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.14/ml/index.html
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