Dileep M. Kumar said on Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 10:16:19AM +0530,:
In Malayalam we can call Free Software as "Swatantra Ganana Soothram". What do other Malayalees in this list say ?
While this is literally accurate, in modern Malayalam, `soothram' is understood as a `trick'.
My vote is for `software'.
Let us not go the French way. The French, unlike the English (that is, people living in England) have a sort of puritanic/fanatic approach to their language. They go out of way to find their own substitutes for concepts borrowed from other languages. Linguists agree that as a consequence of such fanaticism, the French language is much poorer.
We can try to learn from errors of the French.
BTW, French term for `software' is something like `logicel'