In a high profile ceremony, Smt. Sonia Gandhi, Chairman of the National Advisory Council of India, and Thiru Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology released a free CD of software containing Hindi language tools and fonts based on open source software in New Delhi this week. To the rousing applause of the audience, Thiru Maran asserted that this freely available office suite is in every way the equal of Microsoft Office.
In Chennai, on April 15th, marking the Tamil New Year, India’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) showed off its latest efforts to help close India’s digital divide. A complete bundle of open source computer software including the localized Tamil version of OpenOffice.org was released. Hundreds of computer fonts and tools in Tamil were given away amid great fanfare and political and media excitement.
During Matt Szulik’s visit to New Delhi’s LinuxAsia 2005 in early February, technologist Alolita Sharma caught up with him and he agreed to an e-mail interview, which was published by Alolita in the March edition of Linux For You magazine. Matt covered a range of issues, emphasizing Red Hat’s unwavering commitment to support the open source community.
“Price-slashing” by monopolistic proprietary software companies masks the high costs customers still unwittingly pay. And when this rip-off is endorsed by governments and industry leaders, the digital divide can only widen.
IBM, C-DAC and IIT-Bombay team up to invest Rs 50 million in an Open Source Software Resource Center (OSSRC) in India.
After more than twenty years, the non-English computing world of India is poised to explode in an exciting flurry of Open Source Software projects. What standards are needed? And how can progress be sustained?
As part of a panel discussion, Technetra discussed the need for a deeper understanding of the legal and business issues of Open Source software in Indian language localization.
Interoperability, localization and support are key for the open source desktop.
To build an open knowledge-based economy, the right problems must be recognized, supportive processes must be encouraged, and strong policies must be enacted.
In this article, the author tracks the progress of adoption of open source software across the world. In search of technologies best suited for their countries, governments around the world are looking into Linux and open source software technologies.
