2004.05_Speaking Bengali, Meeting in Spain, Winning in Russia.pdf

NEWS

World

World News

Tux Speaks Bengali

Little more than one year after its forma-

tion, the Ankur Bangla Project has

released the AnkurBangla LiveDesktop

v1.0, which is both a LiveCD distribution

based on GNOME 2.4, and a milestone in

the Bengali localization of Linux. Bengali

(or Bangla) is not only the language of

Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath

Tagore, but with about 200 million native

speakers also the 5th (some sources

claim 7th) most widely spoken language

in the world.

Despite its version number, release

coordinator Sayamindu Dasgupta prefers

to call the release, codenamed “Paanto-

Bhuter Jyaanto Chhaanaaa”, a techno-

logy preview. However, much has been

improved since the previous beta release.

Updated packages include xine-lib (now

at 1.0-rc1) and Gaim 0.72 (with support

for the newer avatars of MSN and Yahoo!

protocols). The documentation has been

updated. With this release, as

soon as the end users pops

the CD into a Windows box,

it autoruns, displaying a nice

HTML page and coming up

with information about the

CD and directions on how to

boot from it.

The Ankur group is an example of a

classical FLOSS organization, being

exclusively virtual in nature. It includes

hackers, technology specialists, linguists,

font designers, graphic artists, and

enthusiasts from India and West Bengal.

Providing a completely localized Linux

operating system is one of the core issues

that this group takes seriously.

The project’s page lists quite a few of

them, like Bangla Gutenberg, an archive

of Public Domain works in Bengali,

Lekho, a multi-platform editor and docu-

ment output program, and BSpeller, a

spellchecker and dictionary that is inte-

grated in the LiveCD at the modular

level.

The Ankur effort is being consolidated

at two levels, a localized KDE (with a

possible release of a KDE LiveCD) and a

full-blown enterprise scale distribution.

The group is also defining the paradigm

of Localized Low Cost Computing, some-

thing that is being referred to as L2C2.

Extending the concept of low cost com-

puting, L2C2 involves extensive customi-

zation in order to produce a content rich

computing experience.

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http://www.bengalinux.org/

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The Open Source World Met in Spain

New Office in Haarlem

When an upgrade of its office software

became imminent, the Dutch city of

Haarlem (located close to Amsterdam)

evaluated the option of moving to

OpenOffice. Research proved that chang-

ing to Open Source software would save

over half a million Euro, without losing

any functionality. The study (in Dutch)

will be going online soon, and IBM has

announced plans to translate the docu-

ment into English.

The decision in favor of migration was

made accordingly. Its implementation

will force the IT-department to rebuild

document templates. But migrating to a

newer version of Microsoft Office would

have meant doing that too. The lack of

compatibility between Microsoft Office

versions seems to offset the startup costs

normally found with Open Source solu-

tions.

Haarlem can now offer its 147,000 citi-

zens lower TCO, and the status symbol

of being the first city in the Netherlands

to make such a move.

Open Source and royal glamor, that’s not

exactly something that one would expect

to mix easily. But in Málaga, a city in the

south of Spain, the two did meet at the

city’s first International Open Source

World Conference February 18th to 24th,

2004, as the conference was inaugurated

by HRH Crown Prince Felipe de Borbón

himself. In his opening speech at the

Palacio de Ferias y Congresos, a modern

building with wireless and UMTS access,

Prince Felipe talked about the impor-

tance of making technology accessible to

everyone, no matter what their social

and economic status might be.

The city of Málaga is located in the

Spanish region of Andalusia which

prides itself in a local Linux distribution,

just like the region of Extremadura with

LinEx (see Issue 31, p13). GuadaLinex,

another offspring of Debian GNU/Linux,

was developed in response to the local

government’s plan to deploy Open

Source and free software. During the

conference, the organizers handed out

10,000 GuadaLinex CDs and 2,500 tech-

nical manuals.

Beside attending the conference pro-

gram, an interested audience also took

part in several forums and workshops.

The speakers included Miguel de Icaza,

who spoke about the “Mono” project, a

free version of Microsoft’s .NET technol-

ogy, and Niranjan Rajani, the head of the

Finnish study on the significance of free

and Open Source software for developing

countries (see Issue 33, p84).

One of the most interesting workshops,

titled “The Vision of the Gurus”, was

held on the last day with Debian project

leader Martin Michmayr, Novell’s Miguel

de Icaza, Sun’s Chief Technology Evange-

list Simon Phipps and Bdale Garbee from

HP discussing the vision and future of

Open Source. Altogether 5,000 visitors

from countries like Spain, Germany,

Italy, the Netherlands and Australia

made this event a major success. ■

http://www.opensourceworldconference.

com/

■

May 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

■

World

NEWS

■

Open Content Licences Go Japan

When licenses resemble the legal code

processed by legal “operating systems”

of various jurisdictions, it is important to

“port” or adapt them for use across those

different systems. At the beginning of

March, Creative Commons (CC) and

GLOCOM, the Tokyo-based Center for

Global Communications at the Interna-

tional University of Japan, released

official Japanese copyright licenses for

iCommons (International Commons)

Japan, the first country-specific adapta-

tion of the Open Content system.

The licenses, translated into the Japan-

ese language and adapted to Japanese

law, allow copyright holders to easily

inform others that their work is freely

available for copying and other uses,

under specific conditions, and thus to

declare some rights as reserved.

The accompanying self-help tools,

which are provided free of charge, pro-

vide new ways of distributing creative

work on generous terms across the broad

spectrum between full copyright and

public domain. Japanese-speaking visi-

tors to the Creative Commons website

can look forward to a full Japanese trans-

lation of the license choice process as

the site detects the user’s web browser

settings.

Unlike the original CC licenses, Japan-

ese copyright law is based on continental

European laws. The main task in the

process of porting these licenses, there-

fore involves both literal and legal

translation. Taiwan and China, the other

two Asian countries in the iCommons

project, are currently struggling with

major changes in substantive law regard-

ing the CC licences, too.

According to Motohiro Tsuchiya, the

iCommons Japan project leader, assis-

tant professor and senior research fellow

at GLOCOM, many people in Japan are

using the licenses for their blogs. This is

probably due to the fact that Lawrence

Lessig, the chairman of Creative Com-

mons and professor of law at Stanford,

himself does so. Amongst the many

strong supporters of the CC licenses,

there are, however, only a few big com-

mercial adopters in Japan.

■

http://creativecommons.org/projects/

international/

http://www.glocom.ac.jp/

Linux Beats Windows in

Russia

Russia is getting down to business with

Open Source (see also Issue 40, p11):

According to the Russian newspaper

“Kommersant”, the country’s Ministry of

Education signed a new contract with

the local company “Lokomotiv” to install

Linux on more than 14,000 PCs.

The Russian Linux distributor Alt-

Linux will provide the software, and

Novell will be responsible for customer

support. About 90 percent of the invest-

ment, will be spend on hardware,

however.

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