http://anivar.movingrepublic.org/2007/smc-sfd07-wide-news-coverage-in-malaya...

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) got widespread support from malayalam mainstream print media for the 2 day (14th & 15th september) software freedom day celebration & the release of 7 software packages developed during last year. It is the time to look at our history.

SMC is reactivated from a dead state, as a result of personal discussions with praveen, hiran & vimaljoseph in the sidelines of GPLv3 Conference in bangalore. The new team is setup at last year SFD celebrations in Thrissur. Suresh, Baiju(the founder of SMC), Hussain KH (rachana), Anwar, Students in GEC etc also joined in the team at that time. Now we have more than 30 developers+localizers. The astounding progress within the short span of time is described below

* December 2006: Debian Installer is Fully Translated into Malayalam ( The Work of Debian malayalam, a sub team of Swathanthra malayalam computing) * January 2007: Santhosh Thottingal of SMC done a complete architectural rewrite of Dhvani, the Indian language text to speech system by Ramesh hariharan & added Malayalam support to It. * March 2007 : participated & Conducted workshops in FOSS Meet@NITC, Kozhikkode * March 2007: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing selected as a participating Organisation ( and only Indian Organisation) in Google Summer of Code Project. 5 projects were allotted. * April 2007: GNU aspell supported Malayalam (major issues are resolved) * May 2007: Swanalekha: a Phonetic Input scheme for malayalam using SCIM * June 2007: Lalitha, Bolnagiri based xkb keyboard for malayalam by Jinesh * July 2007: Added pango support to Tuxtype by Mobin M as part of GSoC work. Now Tuxtype is usable for all Indian languages * July 2007:Debian package (Debconf )Translations. Malayalam is the Most translated indian language with 27% translation of configuration strings * August 2007: Malayalam Matrix screen saver Release, & First Public Release of Aspell- malayalam spellchecker with More than 137000 words list (It is the largest Indian Language Aspell wordlist. Second is hindi with 25000 words). * September 2007: Gnome Officially supports malayalam in Gnome 2.20 with More than 80% translations * September 2007: Sarika : The first Free Indian language speech recognition engine is developed by Shyam K (as a part of GsoC). It Currently identifies more than 50 malayalam words * September 2007: Tuxtype malayalam is Released by Mobin.M & friends (Vimal, Shreyas, Sreeranj, Prince) * Meera , a Malayalam Traditional opentype font with more than 900 glyphs is released under GNU GPL by Hussain K.H and Suresh P . It is developed for Suruma renderering scheme (not compatible with Uniscribe scheme for windows) . Authors are working on a Uniscribe compatible (windows) version now

Pramode Sir wrote:

A society and a culture is identified by its language - once the language is dead, the society starts losing its identity. A good way to keep a language alive is to take it to the digital world - the world of the PC/Communication devices and the Internet. This is one context in which developing regional language computing environments and popularising them has great significance.

The theme for the 2 day event was "Swathantra Software and Malayalam computing" . Free software is touching the lives of common man now !!

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