Fsf-friends January 2006

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

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35 discussions

[COMMERCIAL] ETDC courses... in Goa
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 23 Jan '06

23 Jan '06

Electronic Test & Development Centre, Goa announces software/IT courses: Linux Sysadmin (consists of Linux Administration modules for professionals). Pre-requisite: Knowledge of Linux installation commands, KDE and GNOME Desktops. Course dates 30 Jan - 2 Feb. Course fee: Rs 4500 + Rs 459 service tax per participant Information Security Management Systems Framework and Implementation ISO/IEC 17799 2000/ISO 27001 : 2005 Course date: 13-14 Feb 2005 Course fee Rs 4500 + Rs 459 service tax per particpant Linux Resource & Security Management Pre-requisite: Must have attended ETDC's Linux Sysadmin Course date: 15-17 FEb 2005 Course fee Rs 3500 + Rs 357 service tax per participant Group discount 10% for three or more participants. Venue: ETDC Conference Hall. Timing 10-17 hrs Further details: OIC (Computer) / OIC (Training) Director / PA to Director Electronics Test & Development Centre GMC NIO Road, PO Goa University Goa 403206 Phone 0832.245 8680-83 Telefax (0832) 245 9784 Email etdc_goa(a)sancharnet.in Payment: Course fees: DD in favour of "Pay & Accounts Officer, Dept of Information Technology" Payable at New Delhi Service Tax: DD in favour of sBI Treasury Branch Service Tax a/c payable at Panjim. Note: For outstation candidates, economical staying arrangements can be made on request.

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Dwayne offers tips on getting started in localisation
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 21 Jan '06

21 Jan '06

Dwayne offers tips on getting started in localisation By Frederick Noronha Dwayne Bailey (34) lives in Pretoria and comes from Cape Town, South Africa. In the world of Free Software and Open Source, Dwayne is well known for preaching the localisation gospel. Says Dwayne: "Actually localisation is everything that makes the computer work for you in your locale (country and language). Translating the computer interfaces is by far the biggest task and ongoing. But its not the complete picture. Keyboards, fonts, locales, date systems, rendering, bidi are all part of localisation." Dwayne has been involved with a major translation project in South Africa. As he put it when we last spoke, "At Translate.org.za we're localising Free and Open Source Software into 11 South African languages. One is English, it's quite an easy one (smiles). The others are Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga, Tswana, Siswati, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Ndebele." [2] But this time, at Africa Source 2, we focussed on another issue. What's the best route for a small-to-medium language to take, if it wants to enter the world of computing? Says Dwayne: "What I'm discovering now is that the first things to do (for any language) is to get in place the basic infrastructure. One reason is so that they can start, the other is so that they can write and do things in their language." Three things need to be checked, he explains. Firstly, whether you can type your language, and have a keyboard to do so. Then, you need to be able to see the text, so font-rendering is the issue here. The third important task is to define a locale for language and country. (In simple language, this is a configuration file that defines whether your language uses the metric or imperial system, what are the names in your language for the days of the weeks and months of the year, what calendar system do you use, and so on...) After this, what? Then, says Dwayne, you're really free to do translations. That's when you need to really start thinking about what you want to achieve. Even a small group can achieve change, he believes. "The reason why you need to define goals is to ensure you don't kid yourself about what you're doing. If you're localising [GNU]Linux into Bulgarian, and you say this is being done so that Bulgarians can use a computer in their language, when in fact they all use Windows, then you need objectives that are based in reality," he explains. Your objectives could be anything. "I'm happy if someone says I'm translating Thunderbird, the email client, into Afrikaans for my 100 year old granny," jokes Dwayne, whose specs and lean figure makes him look much more serious than he is. The import thing is to understand what your goals are like. "It's all about focus. Your objective helps to focus where you put in your energies. In our organisation, we found we were being pushed from pillar to post. Everyone wanted us to translate something, and there was always a good reason," he narrates. But what works well for a small language? "My feeling is that you have to translate stuff that focuses on the end-user. And that narrows down your scope. End-users are the people that are mostly going to benefit from whatever you do," he stresses. Dwayne also suggests that localisation teams look at cross-platform tools, i.e. those that work on multiple operating systems such as GNU/Linux, Windows or Apple Mac. "Even within that, I would define (the more useful tools as) a sub-set: anything to do with communication is probably the most important thing to work on," he explains. Has he emerged wiser from his experiences of past work? "If I was going to do things again, I would prioritise it in the following order: email client, instant messaging and a word processor. When you look at (the whole of) Open Office, it's a relatively large project. But you can (begin by) translating only the word processor." Can localisation in computing really make a difference to a language's future? Dwayne narrates the "interesting story" of the Venda language, which has some 700,000 speakers. "We needed to translate it. I found there were some extra characters needed -- beyond the Latin characters. So I investigated how to make a keyboard, and made it just for fun. I made some fonts." One translator in the team was a linguist. He talked about 'mechanical imperialism', where the deficiencies of the computer were changing the way people could write a language. That is still a problem. This worked itself out in odd ways: a professional translator employed by the South African parliament to translate into Venda, couldn't type all the characters needed. So they would type things out, and then add the 'missing' characters by hand. "Which is completely sad. Valuable information which could be created for the language is completely lost. That's a demonstration that simple things could do amazing things for a language," says Dwayne. Isn't it sometimes an uneasy relationship between techies and linguists, both of whom need a stable partnership to make a translation project a success? Says Dwayne: "Whereever there are issues about techies and translators, the reality is that techies don't appreciate translation. They appreciate translation when it looks good in a press release; but in their behaviour there's not that kind of care. But having said that, there are certain projects where there's a growing respect for the localisers. The key thing there is usually to have a representative for the localisers (in tech teams). They often act as the go-between." Check the TranslateWiki [3], a great starting point for localisation of your language. It offers links to: The WordForge project; The Translate Toolkit (a toolkit to convert between various different translation formats); Pootle (a portal that will enable you to manage your translation project, do web-based translation and offline translation); the Localisation Guide (a guide to how to start and run a localisation project) and a glossary of translation terms. Once programmers see localisers as valuable members of the community and once localisers see responsive programmers both sides begin to see a very healthy relationship, argues Dwayne. "Something that can take us onto 100 languages." Here are some figures that remind us of how serious the task is: There are about 239 languages in Africa with more than one million speakers. Free/Libre and Open Source Software covers about 50-60 languages in total. In Africa currently covered are 10! Says Dwayne: "Localisation is a task that many people can do and clearly we need lots more people to contribute." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_localization [2] http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/237 [3] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/ -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Frederick 'FN' Noronha | http://del.icio.us/fredericknoronha Saligao, Goa, India | fred(a)bytesforall.org Independent Journalist | +91(832)2409490 Cell 9822122436 ----------------------------------------------------------

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Re: FSF in LinuxAsia
by Amol Hatwar 17 Jan '06

17 Jan '06

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 12:37 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Hi > > I will be planning to be around for Linux Asia in Delhi probably all the > time so if you need someone at the booth/stalls on occasions I can help > you with that. It would be helpful if you have some material for me to > go through related to the FSF India activities to answer questions on > that. If you need other help, just let me know and I can potentially > give it a try. Rahul just like Mishi wants to be involved at the FSF stall in Linux Asia 2006. I have asked him to be there at the IRC meets. Regards, ah

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[Fwd: Re: FSFI@LA2006]
by Amol Hatwar 17 Jan '06

17 Jan '06

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[OT] Linuxense Internship program
by Rajkumar S 16 Jan '06

16 Jan '06

Linuxense currently has an opening for its internship program. This is open for those are doing final year B-Tech or MCA or a fresh pass out but hasn't yet taken a job. The work done during this program will be released under GNU GPL. This is a paid internship program of 1-2 months duration (depends on candidate's skill and knowledge). See more details at: http://www.linuxense.com/community/internship.xhtml raj

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Re: Fsf-friends Digest, Vol 33, Issue 10
by Mishi Choudhary 16 Jan '06

16 Jan '06

hi krishna tons of thnx for answering my questions,thgere re a few more as i understand if i develop a software licensed under gpl it implies that anyone else is allowedto copy it ,distribute it,modify it and do whatever is allowed to do as per gpl.then if i develop a software and a person x makes an exact copy of it and sells it for some priceand makes millions over it,hows it justified in that case? what have been the milestones in the history of free software movement? do all proprietary software have free software to copmete with? why should normal ppl like you n me be interested in free software when we never buy licensed software? Warm Regards Mishi Choudhary

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[Fwd: Confirmation for Amol Hatwar/Free Software Foundation showcasing at .ORG MELA at LinuxAsia 2006]
by Amol Hatwar 14 Jan '06

14 Jan '06

Hello all, I had submitted an application to book a Stall for FSF long-time ago. The co-ordinator says that we have a stall. I am sorry I couldn't inform everyone about this sooner as I was away from the Internet for about 10 days. Now a question. Where should FSFI's particiation plan be discussed? On this list or at fsf-delhi or a more discreet/temporary non-public unarchived list? Warm regards, ah

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[Fwd: Re: FSF-India presence in LinuxAsia]
by Sameer N Ingole 13 Jan '06

13 Jan '06

Dear members, Can anyone from FSF-India confirm the authorization for coordination to Alolita Sharma? I did not know Amol Hatwar requested for the stall or he got confirmation. He did not seem to have read the mail of confirmation. Does anyone on the lists have any idea about it? BTW we are sure to get the space for the stall at LinuxAsia. Please Advice. Regards, -------- Original Message -------- From: - Fri Jan 13 23:26:48 2006 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000 Message-ID: <43C7E9DC.80002(a)proscrutiny.com> Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 23:26:44 +0530 From: Sameer N Ingole <strike(a)proscrutiny.com> User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20041020) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: asharma(a)technetra.com CC: atul(a)efyindia.com Subject: Re: FSF-India presence in LinuxAsia References: <43C7613F.9050006(a)proscrutiny.com> <43867.210.18.184.87.1137171132.squirrel(a)www.os3i.org> In-Reply-To: <43867.210.18.184.87.1137171132.squirrel(a)www.os3i.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Alolita, Amol Hatwar is one of our volunteers. He is currently out of station and I am not sure if he read your mail but in order to get confirmation I am going to ask people from gnu.org.in to authorize me for further coordination. As for what part of FSF, I would do everything that is needed and legitimate, to protect legal rights of FOSS contributers. Thank you for your reply. Regards, -- Sameer N. Ingole Volunteer Free Software Foundation of India --- Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. Alolita Sharma wrote: >Hi Sameer, > >Thanks for your email. We have already confirmed a stall for FSF in the >.ORG Mela at LinuxAsia to a person named Amol Hatwar (amol(a)hatwar.org) >claiming to be representing FSF-India. However, we have not received any >confirmation from him to confirm FSF's presence in the .ORG Mela. > >Can you please let me know what part of FSF are you representing and who >is Amol Hatwar? I would like to get email from the main coordinators of >FSF India in order to ensure FSF is legitimately and well represented at >LinuxAsia. > >Look forward to receiving details from you. > >With best regards, >Alolita > > >>Dear Alolita, >> >>We are volunteers for FSF-India. FSF India is a non-profit organization >>committed to advocating, promoting and propagating the use and >>development of swatantra software in India. >> >>India chapter of FSF is planning to showcase GNU software which will >>mainly include GNU/HURD, GNU/Linux, GCC, GCJ and several other GNU >>software. For this display, we will need at least two PC (more is good). >> >>We are also planning to put GNU Books/Manuals, Free Software CDs, CDs >>with talks of FSF and GNU luminaries, T-shirts on sale if that is Ok. >> >>I would be greatful if you let me know the possibility and procedure of >>getting space/stall in .ORG Mela in LinuxAsia 2006. >> >>Regards, >> >>-- >>Sameer N. Ingole >> -- Sameer N. Ingole Blog: http://weblogic.noroot.org/ --- Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

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Re: [Fsf-delhi] FSF-India in LinuxAsia 2006
by Sameer N Ingole 13 Jan '06

13 Jan '06

> Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: > >> Sameer N Ingole wrote: >> >> >>> Do you know anyone from organizing body of LinuxAsia? I want to get the >>> firm answer from them about the stall space for FSF India. Tomorrow >>> I am >>> going to talk to them on phone and if I don't get anything firm, on >>> Saturday I will go to their office in Noida. Printing posters have >>> to be >>> postponed till we get assurance for stall space. >>> >> >> Additionally, provide clear indications that the idea is to sell >> merchandise and whether the committee are ok with that. > Baishampayan, all, Can we get GNU books to put on sale on the stall so I will mention it in there. Should we sale CDs/DVDs or give-away? Should we sale T-shirts? If yes where and in how much time can we arrange them? (I have no Idea about where we can get T-shirts printed or how much time it will take to arrange things.) Please give your inputs Regards, -- Sameer N. Ingole Blog: http://weblogic.noroot.org/ --- Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

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FSF-India in LinuxAsia
by Sameer N Ingole 13 Jan '06

13 Jan '06

Hi All, Sorry for my previous post (subject: Re: [Fsf-delhi] FSF-India in LinuxAsia 2006). There have been some discussion going on whether to put some GNU stuff on sale on FSF-Delhi. I want to know how/when/where can we get GNU books/Manuals, T-shirts (with GNU messages/graphics) that we can put on sale in LinuxAsia? Regards, -- Sameer N. Ingole Blog: http://weblogic.noroot.org/ --- Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

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Fsf-friends January 2006