Tamil Language Open Source Tools & Apps released in Chennai
On the auspicious occasion of the Tamil New Year, MCIT showed off its latest efforts to help close India’s digital divide. The packed release event was hosted by Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Dayanidhi Maran. Other dignitaries included Mr. Brijesh Kumar, IT Secretary, MCIT, Chief Guest Dr. Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi, Prof. N. Balakrishnan, IISc Bangalore, Mr. S Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC, Robert Adkins, Co-Founder, Technetra, N. Ram Editor-in-Charge, The Hindu and others.
A complete bundle of open source computer software was released in the Tamil language. Hundreds of computer fonts and tools in Tamil were given away amid great fanfare and political and media excitement.
These Tamil-localized tools and applications are designed to spread the benefits of information technology and to empower a broader infrastructure for automation, communications, and education in India. The Tamil software release is part of the Indian Language Technologies Launch Program.
Mr. S Ramakrishnan, Director General of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), presented the details of the software: True Type fonts, Unicode compliant Open Type fonts, a FireFox browser, Bharateeya OpenOffice.org, an e-mail processor, a Java-based editor with spell checker, and an optical character recognition tool. The fonts and many of the tools represented newly liberated software comprising years of research and development from C-DAC, India’s leading government language lab. Many of the tools and applications are cross-platform and can be run on either Microsoft Windows or on Linux.
The Tamil open source software is being distributed on a compact disc and is also available on-line from website www.ildc.in. To spread the buzz, MCIT plans to distribute three million copies of the CD free of cost through libraries and schools.
This event represented the first official release of tools and applications in a much larger campaign to provide localized computer software for all 22 of India’s official languages. The next release will be targeted for Hindi speaking users.
At the same event, Microsoft announced a Tamil version of their proprietary Office 2003 which will be priced at a discount of 30% off the English edition. But, to the Penguin at least, a 30% discount still seemed a lot more expensive than free.
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