FSF has a GPL Software Certification Program and Compliance Lab. To quote from the link –

The certification program provides corporations with the assurances they require when building products upon a Free Software infrastructure. When you purchase certification, FSF undertakes a comprehensive engineering and legal review of your software release to ensure that your work has been done in compliance with GPL and related Free Software licenses.

. The question is that should we begin to look at a similar function in India ?

This is an important issue when considering the various structural components of Indic L10n. More importantly, when considering the important issues of fonts and converters. My dear friend Venkatesh Hariharan often laments about the availability of good quality of fonts in the various Indian languages. Even those that are available are having unclear licensing regimes. Perhaps this is one of the reasons which prompted Soumyadip to make this post.

The Free Software Foundation has a strong presence in India, and given the stellar role it has been playing in terms of influencing policy decisions related to use of Free software in e-Governance, Education and the like, perhaps it will not be out of bounds for it to take it on. Being a proud member of the body, I am well aware as to the shortage of manpower and the sheer lack of resources. Perhaps this is the best time to address these issues.

When discussing the idea amongst a few friends, the one refrain that I heard was that this might lead to a duplication of the efforts. I think not. Prima facie it does. But if we look deeper into the matter, the members of FSF-India are very much aware and involved in the Indic L10n process. In fact, the Indic L10n community is small and tightly integrated. Thus, a preliminary validation of the licenses could be easily carried out.

An immediate benefit of such an activity might be the prevention of case where unwittingly GPL/GPL-like license violation takes place.

Has anyone faced similar issues ?

This is easily replicable across Linux and Windows platforms. I am currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

For sometime I have been playing around with information retrieval tools with the basic requirement that creating my own APIs through extension would be easy. Another requirement is that the existing documentation should be near complete. Take a look at Xapian for those who want the same thing. Here is a sample code of the indexer. Mind you that this is highly simplified. Sometime later would start playing around with Lucene.

Current reading list includes stuff on this.

Here and here are 2 nice news pieces

If you ask any student passing out from the education system of West Bengal to define technology, 9 out of 10 would use definitions found in J Bronowski’s piece which is a part of the syllabus. Here is a definition that I like.

This post started from idle flipping through TV channels. I have this odd (and often annoying) habit of rapidly flipping through the channels, as a result the mishmash of images tend to form a chaotic blur. A few days back I was indulging in the same when I chanced upon some channel where Shobhaa De (I am sure there is one ‘a’ too many that I have put in !) was chatting with Sam Pitroda. At that particular moment in time the talk had veered to “Technology and India” when Sam had made an insightful observation. According to most “technology” is seen as something as elitist, glamorous and sexy. In fact in its simplest form “technology is a problem solver”. And that is exactly what it is.

In its simplest forms Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are problem solvers. These technologies provide the toolkits which attempt to successfully address and resolve the everyday problems. ICTs based on FLOSS are important in 2 aspects. They integrate the blue-sky vision as well as the ground level real world. Existing between these two paradigms is difficult and perhaps this is one of the reasons why FLOSS-ICT projects are more often than not addressing the grander aspects of the world vision.

Do check here and here

This is an important step in consolidating all the Indic Native Language Projects working in OpenOffice.org

As part of its mission, the Indic native-lang group will have to:
* coordinate localization efforts and developments
* mutualize and help the projects with the localized builds’QA.
* speed up the adoption of OpenOffice.org on a local basis and help
coordinate its promotion
* coordinate documentation writing
* communicate with the other projects of OOo and the native-lang confederation
* ease the communication between the Indic native-lang projects

Sometime back I had asked whether we were at the initial stages of a change. There was a reason to the introspection.

The roadmap for the Indic L10n began with a demonstration or (to pacify the purists) a Proof of Concept desktop. We have come a long way from there. The times when getting a desktop to be presentation ready was more of an arcane art than straightforward intuitive actions are behind us. We are now slowly but surely moving towards application oriented L10n and framework oriented L10n. Of these 2, the latter model is very significant. A framework model leverages the existing toolkits and provides an extensible platform for developers and programmers to work with. As a logical extension to the Services Oriented Architecture the framework model allows creation of L10n Services which can be commodified into L10n Products.

Commodification of Services is an important aspect required to keep costs down and make deployment affordable. The positioning of L10n in ICT4D is based on immediate relevance and deployment-readiness. A major factor in pushing such choice is cost. Keeping recurring costs to an affordable level while ensuring that service cost centers are present for the developers would lead to a healthier subsystem of service vendor leading perhaps to a more functional ecosystem.

L10n in India has to include a wider range of people bringing in more varied and much diverse skillsets. They need to have an understanding of the deployment scenario, a basic knowledge of project management but more fundamentally – a thorough understanding of the value of L10n provided through FLOSS. Such a group should necessarily include application developers, application service providers, technology managers and the like. For a range of these skillsets there are no real formal training programs available, and thus consequently no codified knowledge. The metadata has to be obtained from field work and from sensitivity to the Indic L10n sphere.

The question still remains as to why I feel these are special times… Very important. Primarily, I see a change in the way Indic L10n is being done. I see a roadmap for the efforts – an initiative to consolidate the resources and create shared knowledge pool. I see an acceptance in government sphere of the deployment readiness of FLOSS based L10n technology stack. I look around and see small components which complete L10n stacks falling into their assigned places in the jigsaw – good quality fonts (and font families), converters, application toolkits, applications, component -driven base framework, localised applications (including Office suite components and others like avsap), collaborative platforms and web application servers such as Plone, Digital Library Information Systems and repositories (like DSpace and Koha).

One of the major factors that favor adoption and acceptance of FLOSS as a technology stack is the lowering of TCO. Moving a bit further, what L10n does is it changes the way groups of developers and end users collaborate and participate. This is a fundamentally important principle. End users want to and if given a chance can be innovators with the technologies they consume. The participatory model of FLOSS is unique that it encourages (and perhaps mandates) such User Driven Innovation. UDI would go a long way in providing a positive push to FLOSS efforts in the Indic L10n sphere. By reducing application development cycle, by putting in more responsive project management ground rules, by ensuring optimal feature and scope creep and by providing rapid prototyping with sharing of knowledge.

Would adoption of User Driven Innovation be the one little thing that will make the big difference ?

From the Fedora Desktop mailing list an interesting perspective from an Ordinary User