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Why Linux Makes Sense for India
Why Linux Makes Sense for India
Falling costs have made computers more affordable to a larger section of India's population. At the same time, the Internet has made the PC a compelling proposition for fulfilling communications, education, entertainment and information needs. Based on these two trends, the market for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is likely to take off significantly in India.
Yet, India faces a peculiar problem in that almost all popular operating systems and applications packages are available only in English, a language which is spoken by a mere ten percent of the population. The lack of "Indianized" software is therefore an issue that seriously hampers the growth of the Indian computer industry. For almost 915 million Indians, the lack of Indian language interfaces is one among many issues that hamper their ability to reap the benefits of information technology. This is creating a new class of people who live in what can be called as "Information Poverty" even as technology becomes cheaper and cheaper.
At the infrastructure level, the barriers to information access are dropping dramatically with new ISPs coming into India and several players jockeying to provide bandwidth and other back-end services. However, without operating systems, applications and Internet content in Indian languages, key benefits of the digital revolution-e-commerce, low cost communication through e-mail, access to information databases, telemedicine services etc are denied to the Indian masses. Giving Internet access to an Indian who does not know a shred of English is like giving someone the keys to a car when there are no roads to drive on!
One development that can help India out of this deadlock is a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages.
Linux is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify it to suit their own needs. Linux is a collaborative effort of thousands of programmers interacting over the Internet and is therefore not owned or controlled by any one company. In this article, we outline the economic and cultural imperatives for the localisation of Linux.
Free operating systems have several advantages for developing countries because most software packages today are developed in the west and then sold in developing countries where the parameters of affordability are completely different. The Bangladeshi activist Shahidul Alam expresses these differences poetically when he says, "A modem costs more than a cow." The benefits of free software multiply exponentially when we look at large-scale implementations. The Government of Mexico is estimated to have saved close to $125 million that would otherwise have been spent on proprietary systems when it signed up Red Hat to implement Linux in more than 140,000 schools and colleges across Mexico. In India too, large operators like World-Tel (which plans to have a thousand Internet Centres in Tamil Nadu, with each of them having between two to 20 PCs each) have expressed their intention to go the free software way. The company is negotiating similar deals with several other state governments. Organizations like World-Tel, Internet centres, schools and homes etc. can be expected to be significant users of Indian language operating systems.
The growth of content in platform-independent file formats (HTML, MP3 etc) has also reduced the dependence on a specific operating system, making Linux a viable option.
Apart from these, there are cultural reasons that make Linux attractive. The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh.
The openness of Linux (and other free operating systems like Free BSD) allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs.
It is therefore clear that Linux is a very attractive long-term solution to India's computing needs.
Localising the user interface of Linux to all the 18 official Indian languages will involve changing the menus and help-text to Indian languages and creating a whole stack of applications and tools (word processors, browsers, spell-checkers etc.) to enable computing in Indian languages.
This is a task that involves both technical and linguistic challenges. For example, should "File" simple be called "File" but written in Indian scripts because it is now a part of popular usage? Or should we find Indian language equivalents? In some cases it makes little sense. For example, how many people know that the Hindi word for computer is "sanghanak"? Or what is the Hindi equivalent for "Internet"? A very sensitive balance has to be struck between practicality and preserving Indian languages. However, Indian linguistic groups will have to wake up to the fact that their languages will become outdated if they do not become a part of the digital age. In fact, the Internet can be one of the finest means of recording, archiving and propagating Indian culture. Since culture is embedded in language to a significant degree, the ability to compute in one's native language can give Indian culture a significant boost.
However, one of the greatest roadblocks to computing in Indian languages has been the lack of widely accepted standards. If millions of people are able to freely e-mail each other, it is because of a widely accepted standard called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). It is sad that in spite of claims that India is a software superpower, we cannot harness IT for the benefit our own nation's citizens and the greatest stumbling block is a lack of agreement on standards. Check out ten different Hindi newspapers on the Web to see for yourself. You'll end up downloading and installing ten different fonts that (in most cases) can be used for browsing that one site and nothing else. It is because of this reason that Hindi, despite being one of the largest spoken languages in the world, has a negligible presence on the Web. Informed sources feel that the Unicode standard (which Microsoft has adopted for the upcoming Windows 2000 operating system) will soon become the de-facto standard settling the language standards issue once and for all. If this prediction comes to pass, it will significantly increase the domestic market for hardware, software and services, which is restricted only to a small fraction of India's population that understands English.
There are several initiatives that are underway in order to make this possible. The National Centre for Software Technology has submitted a proposal to the Technology Development in Indian Languages of the Government of India. TheIndian Institute of Technology, Madras has already started work on localising Linux to Malayalam and Tamil. My own institute, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore has committed resources to this the "IndLinux" project and started a collaborative effort to realise this goal. IndLinux has attracted the interest of organizations like FreeOS.com and many individuals located around the world.
In conclusion, it has to be said that the Indianisation of Linux is probably one of the most practical ways of making information technology available to millions and millions of Indians. It is now upto linguistic and technical groups to collaborate and make things happen.
-0-
Prof. Venkatesh Hariharan is with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. He can be reached at venky@iiitb.ac.in.
On the other hand, a magician would have a virtual bag of holding :)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Alright, the Indian population is estimated at close to a billion people. But this does not constitute a potential market of a billion people.
For starters, lets look at the literacy rate. Slightly more than the 50% of the Indian population are literate. where the Indian government defines being literate as the ability to read and write a letter.
Now lets look at affordability. About 30% of the people live around or below the poverty line - which is a hand-to-mouth existence. For such people, the basic necessities of life like food, clothing, and shelter are more of a priority than being able to surf the web.
And what about the infrastructure? Telecommunication quality in India sucks when compared to western standards. While I have never used a modem in India, I would not be surprised to hear that 28.8K speeds are the upper limit of what can be achieved over normal phone lines. High speed access is mostly a dream. The top-end educational and research institutes (one of which is where the good professor is located) do have high speed access - but we are talking about the common man - not the engineers who earn 10 times what the common man makes.
And last, but not least, lets look at the languages. The Sahitya Academy (the premier institute in India dealing with Indian literature) considers 21 languages worthy of study. These many language constitute a divisive force in getting things to work. It would be far better to improve the standard of education in English, since the people who cant afford to learn English would probably be the same people who cant afford to use the web.
In other words, while Prof. Hariharan may be right about free OS'es being most-suited for India (mainly due to economic reasons), it is wrong to think that it means a huge increase in the free-software community.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Apart from these, there are cultural reasons that make Linux attractive. The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh.
Interesting that the author brings this up. I was recently reading about a very specific form of brain damage, caused by an operation to remove a tumor from the brain. A very small but highly focused amount of damage was done to a patient's language system:
He could name people.
He could name objects.
He could name cities.
He couldn't name a living animal. He would consistently mix up dog, cat, and any other term belonging to the family of "living animal".
If there's one thing linguists have found, it's that the core roots of language are not cultural--they're genetic. The base objects of communications--nouns, verbs, and so on--are by no means the only theoretical communication paradigms, but they're shared by every non-artificial human language.
You might wonder why I bring this up: In designing a method for interacting between a human and a computer, the properties of language are indeed important for establishing relationships. While there may not be literal files and literal folders in Indian culture, the concept of items existing within the branches of a tree is engrained deep within the structure of the human brain.
Now, "File" and "Folder" themselves are western analogies, to be sure. But there's a difference between recontextualizing an idiom and dismissing a natural paradigm.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I propose the Lakshmi file system. The root could be a "god" (your choice), and each subdirectory could be one of many "arms".
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Actually, if you internationalize computing and the Internet, one of the things you're doing is playing into the hands of nationalists. The Internet is a superb melting pot for all nationalities, but the reason for its success in this role is that the use of English removes the primary barriers separating people. You can see it daily on the national-language forums: they're nowhere near as free from nationalist tension as the ones that use English, which are truly international. (Try IRC.)
I love languages and I'm a great advocate of multi-linguism for everyone. Sharing a language brings people together so that the more languages people are taught in school or learn later on, the better they tend to get on with each other (unless politics has got to them first). Furthermore, the use of English on the Internet is a strong lever in the same direction of broad social understanding and cohesion.
In contrast, the "internationalization" of computing systems is a complete misnomer: it's really nationalizing them, in the original sense of the term, ie. giving them a national orientation. Of course one might argue that it helps those that know only the national language and no other, but that's precisely the point: they no longer need to gain an international viewpoint once that has been done. And that's not to mention the dark side, namely the benefit to those that seek advantage from nationalism, ie. the politicians and puppet masters.
This "internationalization" bandwagon is unstoppable, but alas it has disadvantages as well as the more obvious advantages. And don't believe that the promoters (I'm talking about politicians here) are all altruistic. Pigs don't fly, not even abroad.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Having recently had the experience of having to teach my mom Windows, I can fully tell you it's only easy if you already understand computers. All operating systems are equally hard when you're starting out (except maybe MacOS), so why not get 'em on the good stuff right away?
Also, because source is available to 99% of Linux apps, they're easily internationalized by Indian hackers and distros. Try that with Winamp or mIRC. KDE has a very nice internationalization framework in place, and console apps can use GNU gettext. Because Linux apps are often developed by non-US people, they tend to better address i18n issues than the Windows equivalents.
China (slashdot story), Mexico (slashdot story), India... those are significant populations. It's a step in the right direction.
Remove language barriers: internationalize all parts of Linux.
Remove affordability barriers: release up-to-date packages that are designed to be useable on old 386 systems. In a lot of countries, Pentium are unaffordium.
Remove barriers to access: donate your old hardware to third-world countries. Help get Linux distributed -- donate a diskette-set to an emerging-world school.
Remove application barriers: internationalize applications. Identify what old software (running on DOS, Commodore, other old iron) should be ported to Linux.
Support the world outside of the little space you inhabit. Think outside the USA, think outside white Europe. Most of the world isn't like you. Look after them, and it'll pay back a hundredfold...
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
First of all, the accepted term for translating a program's text and other conventions is 'localisation' - technically, internationalisation is the process of ensuring that software is very easily localised.
More importantly, why do so many people think that they should have the choice of using the Internet in their native language (which I'd guess is English for many people with this view), but that other people should not? Why don't you all learn written Chinese so *you* can benefit from an international outlook.
Just because English happens to be the language most used on the Internet does not mean that everyone should be forced to use it. In fact, I think it would do a lot of good to some anglophones to have to use another language occasionally.
On a practical note - for any Linux users who want a nicely internationalised + localised distribution - check out Mandrake 6.1 or later (7.0 is now downloadable). This has a great default setup that includes all the fonts required to surf to Japanese, Chinese, Korean and other sites using my normal Netscape 4.7 (English version). Even though I only know a few Chinese characters, it's great to at least be able to see the page and maybe send it to a friend who can read it (as an image attachment, no doubt...).
Mozilla (http://mozilla.org) has a great page on i18n and l10n, with some good resources.
Check your facts before posting - most US modems work fine in the UK and other countries once you set them to blind dial (AT X3, i.e. ignore dialtone). They may have difficulty detecting engaged tones as well but this is not too important for hearing modem users.
The important issue is power supplies, which are always different (but a 110-240V supply will do fine, and suitable local adapters can usually be found), and telephone socket standards (there are literally tens of different ones... See http://www.teleadapt.com/ for examples).
Internal modems, probably ISA, are the best bet. As for the other hardware, any PC is better than none IMO - a 386 or above would be fine for browsing the Net with Lynx, or doing email, which is the key app for many people. However, a 486 or Pentium would be able to support a GUI better, allowing better internationalisation support normally.
Many better-educated Indians do speak English and thus have access to the rest of the Internet. But why is it necessary for (say) a grandmother to learn English just to send email to her grandchildren? Learning English is a good thing for many people, but it's not an either/or - many people will learn English, many other people will use localised interfaces.
If SuSE can't manage to remove all the german from their distribution and it's manuals (and let's be honest - they can't), how much chance does anybody have of translating everything into Indian?
We don't have to. The Indians can. They just need some support and coordination with the people who control the relevant code, such as glibc, mozilla, gnome, KDE, and so on. Making sure the language has a language code, that bidi-capable text widgets are used, and so on.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Yes, but perhaps Linux could become that "easier path". India has a tremendous amount of intellectual capital and not much money. Linux could be a dream come true for them. The dev tools for building end user apps are already there ( namely, GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT ), and the Indian hackers have something that they can beat into shape. Perhaps beating Linux is easier for them in the long run than paying Windows licensing fees.
Linux might not be ready for home users yet, but perhaps it can start by taking the government desktops and the server market by storm.
A knowledge of Latin used to be mandatory for educated Europeans and Americans. It was the lingua franca of its day. It is still useful for some professions. German had a similar standing in chemistry.
The reality is that you need to be able to communicate with people in other countries. Today, the most useful language is English. Tomorrow, who knows. Don't confuse practicality with colonialism.
Many of my coworkers are Chinese, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese. Their only common language is English.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How many different languages are spoken in India? Is it more? How prolific are the differnt languages? And what happens when you get a native language operating system out to a population who than can then understand less than 1% of all web content. Sure, there are a lot of purty graphics, but it's the text, man! I guess the question applies to more than just India, but all non-English speaking countries trying to break in to the Internet.
Maybe someone could develop a "Learn English for Web Browsing" site in multiple languages... but then again after taking years of Spanish in high school and college (which I promptly forgot) I don't think I could learn it from a web site.
Ah, screw it, lets just internationalize the stuff and see what happens. Worst case scenario: using their new found informational power India takes over the world (and the web) and I can't understand any of the content... :)
Got a web site? Want to know if it's up? Try @watch for free!
Windoze is only easier to use if you're used to it. I heard my girlfriend's 11 year old daughter tell one of her friends that "windows sucks...linux is way better" and her 5 year old has no trouble logging in to play games and fool around. The truth of it is, Microsoft is only intuitive to those who have used it for years and expect things to be in certain places. My father had a hell of a time going from win311 to win95 because there were too many ways to do the same thing and nothing really analogous to the program manager with all his programs laid out in front of him. He still refuses to use the start menu. Mexico will produce millions of children who find Linux as intuitive as American kids find Windows. And, with all good fortune, so will India and China. You think some of those kids will be the next Alan Cox or Linux Torvalds or Larry Wall? I bet they will.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Don't you think the US (and every other 1st world) country should also take care of their poor, the hungry, the homeless, the high crime rate in particular areas, the victims of racism, sexism (pay inequity for women), homophobia, those unable to afford a university or college education despite their opportunities, the arms race with China, etc... instead of wasting resources on wiring the nation to make Net access ubiquitous or providing 500 TV channels?
There are problems at all levels of society that need to be addressed simultaneously. You don't just ignore group A to help group B, just because group A has their essential needs met.
Furthermore, better IT access enables the economy to grow. The taxes collected during a growing economy can be used to address the problems you mentioned.
While it is important that Indian programmers learn English and become computer literate (most Indian programmers are, by the way), it is not at all essential for all Linux users in India to be English literate.
When Linux is embedded in kiosks and handhelds with handwriting input, the user is not really "using Linux" or "computing" - they are just communicating. While the language used to print assembly docs for the Boeing 737 are in English, a large proportion of the people flying Indian Airlines' 737's are neither airplane mechanics nor
aeronautical engineers.
Yes, the Information Economy is where it's at - however it is not necessary for the whole population to be "computer literate" to be "computer users" and gain the benefits of the Information Economy.
The last farmer in India will be "computer literate" about the same time that the last homeless person on the streets of San Francisco becomes computer literate. In other words there will be (for a long time) people at the other end of the Information continuum that will not get immediate benefits.
It is a common mistake in reasoning (often seen on Slashdot and other forums) to assume all Linux users are or need to be programmers. An ATM user uses computers and is part of the Information Economy without necessarily being a computer programmer or even what we call a "computer user"
In fact the future success of Linux and of computing lies in making it ubiquitous so that people everywhere use it and it works and they don't want or need to know what lies underneath.
Only a small fraction of the population needs to understand English, computer programming and Linux before Linux is everywhere. So let's focus on achievable goals closer to reality than to keep putting out the absurd requirement that 900+ million people in India need to learn English first before they are able to get the benefits of Linux.
I would be quite impressed if the 200+ million people in the US all learned English and computer programming and yet a good proportion of them are beneficiaries of the Information Economy.
Nitin Borwankar,
CEO and President,
Borwankar Research Inc.
The more idiot-proof you make it the smarter the idiots get.
I don't know what's their status right now,
but it's worth looking into it.
http://www.li18nux.org/
Um, what do think is going to fix that? Government propoganda, or selling out their resources to western interests? What the hell do think "telecom infrastructures" are for if not economic development?
Linux helps unindustrialized countries develop their own infrastracture, without going into debt to foreign corporations.
(And geez man, get an education. You seem to think India is some big shanty town. It's the largest democracy in the world and its software industry is huge, probably second to the US).
Cows will get more expensive, if the substance of this article ever comes to pass. Then the ratio of modem prices to cow prices will be much closer to one, and everyone will be happy, right?
I would expect the local value of a cow to be much smaller in a place where cows are traditionally not eaten. I'd rather see a comparison made to something that is more universally consumed and valued, such as wheat. And don't forget to throw in some comparisons to countries like Israel where computer parts are heavily taxed in a (still) war-time economy.
[Don't mind the links -- Slashdot is munging some perfectly good code, again. Maybe the urls are just too big?...]
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
There are no socialist countries in existance. There are many capitalist market economies which are influenced by socialist thought (and they are worse off for it), but a socialist economy requires the absence of a market. It's very unlikely that a socialist economy could survive even one natural diaster. How could it mobilize resources faster than the market? Look at how badly Orissa did, with all the interference that the Indian gov't puts in the ways of the Indian market. I'm very impressed by the Indian people's eagerness to work hard and get ahead. I'm saddened that they don't know enough about economics to shun political solutions.
-russ
p.s. Read any Indian newspaper, or read India Today if you want to see how Marxist India remains. For example, university tenure committees are full of Marxists; to get tenure you must espouse Marxist (that is, Nonsense) economics.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I've got an Indian customer who is switching to Open Source solutions as promptly as they can. They have found that the amount of money they spend on a solution is only lightly correlated with its ability to solve their problems. They've got US investors, so money isn't a problem.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I think that some people have felt in the past that the large number of official languages in India have been responsible for its poverty. The government tried forcing people to learn a different language, with some success at great human cost. I think you'll find that most Indians who haven't learned English have refrained for (their own) very good reasons.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yes, those countries *are* worse off. If you think they're doing well now, imagine how well they would be doing if the market was free to work well. How can you say that pure capitalist market economies breed poverty?? Who's gonna buy all this stuff if everyone is poor?? Sheesh! Use your head, man. Capitalists lend their money to entrepreneurs, who spend it to solve a problem, and then they sell the solution back to the people who got the capitalists' money, keeping a portion of the extra value created. The workers are better off, the entrepreneurs are better off, the capitalists are better off. It's the only way progress has *ever* been made.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
No, it was by stealing capital from peasants, and causing WIDESPREAD DEATH FROM STARVATION. In other words, yes, industrial growth happened, but it came at a horrific cost in human lives. In sum, there was no progress, only bones and factories.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Sorry, no, there is no exploitation. Yes, people do have to work to eat, but absent charity, everyone has always had to work to eat. That's not the fault of capitalism, it's just reality.
And yes, the entrepreneurs who can get megabucks have often had to prove themselves. How else would you expect them to get the money to pay the workers to solve the problem to make more money?
As far as loans to small-scale entrepreneurs goes, just look at the Grameen bank.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It's too bad that critics of capitalism can't be forced to do without the benefits it has brought them. If you don't like capitalism, go back to the land and do without it. Do without your computer, too.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
India needs to get away from the idea that all economic activities should be controlled by the government. Curiously, there are many self-help groups in India, and yet you have the remainder of the Raj, controlling, for example, every aspect of communications, whether wireless or wired.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
We need a modem bank where we can donate old modems, too slow for American lines, but just right for old infrastructure.
This is an incredibly good idea. The only problem I'd foresee is the shipping, and assuming
sponsorship by an international shipper (say, DHL) that could be solved, too. Might be very
good PR for DHL in India to be the source of free US surplus modems.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Telecommunication and transportation infrastructure is what improves wealth, education and peace; not the other way around.
Look in your back yard: the interstate highway system in the US was built when the US economy was doing rather poorly; yet it stimulated growth and development. What exactly was California before the coast-to-coast rail lines were built? Definitely not the 7th largest economy in the world...
That is what creates wealth: Free Trade, Free Speech. Just imagine how irrelevant the US would be in the world today without proper telecomm and transportation infrastructure. After all, America (OK, Australia too) is the only non-contiguous land mass on this planet.
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Why should you assume the same thing wouldn't work for up and coming Indian computer geeks?
,as referred in the article when Professor Venkatesh Hariharan said:
As many others have said, and as I will word (only slightly differently):
Why should you assume the same thing would work for up and coming Indian computer geeks?
What you begin with is what you will be familiar with. I, unfortunately, had my start with Windows, and I therefore seem to know more about what I'm doing while using Windows as opposed to Linux. I wish I had had a start on another OS so I could be more familiar with something more worthwhile.
It's the same with innumerable other things in life.. say, language. The language you grow up hearing/speaking/etc. will be the one you are most comfortable with (AFAIK). I grew up on English, hence, I'm better at it than I am at the foreign languages I'm studying in school now.
I conclude by saying this: You were truly thinking in the spirit of a Westerner
"The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume
why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh. "
when you made your statement because you were assuming that Windows would be a better transition for the Indians. The whole point of the article is that the Indians haven't had access to computers/an OS yet! Therefore, they need something that will work for them/be cheap/be configureable for them... Linux!
Insert mind here.
Dang that's harsh, especially considering all the spare modems I have sitting around, well, a 19.2, 14.4 and some PCMCIA ones.
We need a modem bank where we can donate old modems, too slow for American lines, but just right for old infrastructure.
George
Most people in India can't read anything which can be written in ASCII. This is not true in Peru (Spanish) or AFAIK any of your other examples. Right now, software is generally bad at handling text which is not ASCII-ish (i.e. "Romaniform", so Greek and Russian are OK). The first Operating System to have good support for a non-romaniform language will be a big step in the history of computers, in my opinion. If it's going to be a Free operating system then it's even bigger news in this community. So I think the story is interesting, and relevant.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
France was quite rich when I last checked. (India is not, and never has been, communist)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Since a lot of people are asking these questions, let me give some statistics about India:
1 billion people
66 % literacy rate
20 Major/Different languages with 1000s of dialects each
30 % of the country can speak Hindi
10 % can speak, read and write English
Official Govt language Hindi, however actual Government Language is English - nearly all communication from the government is in local language and English !
Home PC Penetration; a few million.
ISP and internet connections extremely affordable
especially for students.
Did I miss anything ?
If SuSE can't manage to remove all the german from their distribution and it's manuals (and let's be honest - they can't), how much chance does anybody have of translating everything into Indian?
Mind you - it's still better than users being novices in both Linux and English.
While it would be nice to translate user apps into some of the 18 (Yow!) languages spoken in India, a major point of Linux is to allow the user to modify the software to taste. What (spoken) language will the software be written in? Most existing software written in C++, or whatever your preference is, uses the English language, especially the kernel. While I understand that the intent of the article is directed to India's lower classes, what happens to the hacker who wishes to collaborate on an Enligsh-language project, who does not speak Engligh?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who knows 2 languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who knows 1 language?
American.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
My cousin in Bangalore can chat with my Dad in California, USA, instead of paying out the nose for telecom rates. The only reason it's cheaper, AFAIK, is because there are now MULTIPLE ISPs in the country!
Geez, one ISP servicing an area the size of half the US, and not nearly as well-wired (i.e., quality of wiring)....think how the characters on UserFriendly would do....(-;
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Bureaucrats' wages are low; it's accepted and expected that they will compensate for those low wages via bribes. And, for anyone who's studied political science, remember that this is less a rational-legal relationship than a traditional one (in the Weberian sense) -- there are patron-client dyads everywhere, which are diffuse relationships, not limited ones.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
It would be even better to port the Indians to English.
Yes, I know this was a joke. I did laugh. But I wanted to raise a point that isn't always obvious to monolingual English speakers.
I'm the team leader for the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project. Esperanto is unusual among languages. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single monolingual Esperantist anywhere in the world, nor is there likely to be one any time soon. We have no native country as a language and aren't seeking one. For anyone who is confused by this, Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1887. It is usually learned as a second, third or subsequent language.
Everyone on the Esperanto Translation Team could be using free software under other languages for which the localization has already been done. I use Linux with English literals except when I an validating translations. But there is a reason to have complete locales for any language that users might want to use software in conjunction with. I can read English just fine, but when I want to write to a non-English-speaking friend in Esperanto, I need an e-mail client that can handle the character set. And when I am writing in Esperanto, it takes me a moment to switch back and forth. I don't do it instantly. Having messages, menus, etc., in the same language I am working in is a great help.
Teaching the entire world a single common language will not eliminate the need for computing environments that support their native languages. The only thing that would accomplish that would be if we all learned a single language and abandoned all others. That would involve abandoning names, literature, culture. It isn't a step many people are willing to take. Certainly, teach the world English, or French, German, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, Esperanto or any other language. Don't ask them all to give up the perfectly good languages they already have.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Yes, there is a project for localization of free software. The Free Translation Project is an ongoing project to localize free software into as many languages as possible. If yours isn't one of the one's we're already doing, there are a number of people who can mentor you in starting a translation team for your language.
This is not the only project handling translation of free software. Several of the distributions have projects going to translate their installation tools and documentation. And both Gnome and KDE have internationalization projects.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
For example, view http://www.servlets.com/servlet/HelloRosetta via IE5/Win2000.
Mozilla is probably the only open-source app that has the right architecture to support localization and i18n. For instance, Mozilla stores language resources as XML entities, making them easy to localize. Very nice solution IMHO.
Both the Windows and Java API's have significant support for i18n and l18n, such as full support for various character encodings, support for resource files builtin, Collation (being able to do String comparisons and sorting on non-English languages), Time, Date, Metric, and Money formating, etc.
is not the kernel and device drivers supporting it (which they do), but the fact that there isn't an easy to use, widely adopted API for locating language resource strings. In userland, thousands of GNU utilities and scripts shipped with Linux all have hardcoded English language strings in them.
Thus, for any company that wants to create a "RwandaLinux", not only do they have to translate documentation, but they must hire programmers (not writers) who can translate embedded strings in the thousands of userland utilities that ship with typical Linux distributions, and that is a monumental task.
In addition to translating them, they must make sure they are kept up to date with their English counterparts.
None of this is going to change until programmers stop writing code like
printf("The task completed successfully.")
and
if(!strcmp(argv[c], "-delete"))
and start writing code like
printf(getResource(TASK_COMPLETION_MESSAGE));
if(!strcmp(argv[c], getResource(CMDLINE_OPTION_DELETE))
When that happens, there will be no need to keep localized versions "up to date" with the newest CVS trees, but the program text will be separated from the logic.
And when you get right down to it, if you preload NT or 95/98 to require a password and you preload a Linux box to start in init 5 with gnome/gdm, your average new user would undoubtedly have exactly the same level of difficulty learning either.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
When I got my passport about 15 years ago, it listed everything in English and French. When I asked why, I was told that "French was the official international language". It could be that it's not "official" any more, but at the passport office at least, there is still some French momentum.
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No, answers like yours show how far away India is from become a world-dominant country.
When Asian countries wanted to grow their economies, did they whine that everyone wouldn't learn Asian languages? No, they learned English because they realized that international business is conducted in English.
If you want to produce Indian-language content for Indian-language people, go right ahead. But to argue that the Indian people should be closed off from the world's information until the world's information is translated is just stupid.
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Who is talking about civilizing? That's your own bigotry and prejudice speaking.
I'm talking about growing your economy, and bringing your country out of starvation. Wouldn't it be nice if your farmers could read the latest agricultural journals? Oh wait, they better wait until they're translated.
International business is conducted in English. Should the average citizen have the opportunity to engage in international business, or should that only be reserved for the Elite who can afford to become fluent in English?
And if you haven't noticed, most of the information on the web is in English. Is this information only "appropriate" for the rich in India? Are they only to learn "outside" information that the Elite (or the government) deems appropriate to translate?
Yes, it's easy to say "if they need it, they'll learn it", and this argument might even fly in richer countries, but something tells me that India doesn't have quite the same infrastructure for the poorest citizens to be able to access English tutoring.
Once a citizen knows English, and has access to a computer in a library, even the poorest individual has access to much of the knowledge of the world. That citizen can bypass "approved" translations (which might or might not be accurate).
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You'll notice that I said "as a second language".
I agree that it's enriching to learn other languages, but the reason that most of the world speaks (and is taught) multiple languages is practicality. English is the international language, so it makes sense for someone who speaks non-English to learn the "standard" language. In the US, we already speak the "standard" language, so there is no great incentive to learn another one, except for cultural purposes (as you point out).
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First of all, programming is not done in Asian languages, because there is no computer language that uses an Asian language (Is there an Chinese symbol for 'printf'?). Moving past the obvious to your argument about learning English...
You could make EXACTLY the same argument about education in general... "They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is education to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?"
The point of education is to give people the tools to raise themselves above their standing. Maybe if that shoeshine guy knew English, he could study the innumerable amount of information on the web in order to learn a better skill. Or heck, the person could order any number of textbooks (how many are printed in his particular dialect?) He would be able to read CNN to get accurate information about his government in order to help affect change.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that the needs never end. Yes, yet more money could be spent on food and shelter, but this is not a long term solution, because you've done nothing to make the people self sufficient. There simply is not enough resources (in ANY country) to take care of every individual. You have to give each individual an opportunity to better themselves through hard work. And that opporunity begins with an open flow of information.
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Er, I never said that English should be taught to the exclusion of all other education. Obviously that would be absurd.
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First let me say that I understand the need for computers that work in native languages.
But, it seems as if much of the point of essay is to improving the Indian economy and help them get "plugged in" to the world. If that's the goal, then it's much more important to change the education infrastructure so that the majority of the population learns English as a second language.
As the professor himself points out, most of the web is in English. Once Indians are on the web, they will still be limited in the information that they can use. Imagine the effect of citizens being able to access all the information of the web, not just information that originates in India (or is written in an Indian language).
English is the standard international language of the world (Yes, I know French is "officially" the international language, but... that's a joke). For any country that wants to break out of "third world" status, a population fluent in English is absolutely critical.
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I don't want to sound like a troll, but shouldn't the indians be more concerned about overpopulation, poverty and the usual like disease, famine and war with pakistahn? It's just like the UN talking about taxing the west's email use to build better telecom infrastructures in 3rd world nations despite the fact that most of the people in those countries are either too poor to afford the necessary equipment or are starving to death.
Many of the points above are shared with other non-Western languages (lack of a single standard character set, the issue of linguitics, user interface, ...etc.)
Here in the Middle East, we face a strikingly similar set of problems, with some added bonus. People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to this Times article), making it the Fifth language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.
Arabic is unique in that it needs the peripherals (the VT100 terminal and the printer) to support automatic contextual character shaping on the fly, and Right-to-Left orientation. It shares these qualities with other Semitic language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Nabatean). So, a character set and a font is not enough, like the case in most western language.
Several years ago, there were lots of character sets, each in use by a different hardware vendor, and even many vendors had several character sets. A standard (called ASMO-708) emerged, and was adopted by almost all vendors using ASCII (IBM was EBCDIC, so they were different).
In the early 1990s, a company called Al Alamia developed a version of Microsoft Windows 3.x that supports many character sets, including ASMO-708. Microsoft hired (read stole!) the main developer from Al Alamia, there was a law suit.
When Windows 95 came, the battle was won (by MS!) in the Arabic arena.
When the web arrived, things got even worse (from a standard point of view) and a Netscape version (called Sindbad) was developed by Sakhr to navigate the web in Arabic, and lately released it as a plug-in to Navigator 4.x. It is terribly slow though. Microsoft won the browser wars, and virtually all the Arabic users are now using Windows 95/98/NT with MS Internet Explorer. New development of Arabic web pages is almost done entirely for MS Internet Explorer. Not good!
Dynamic fonts are great and are used by a few sites. They work great with MS IE or NS Navigator, but are not widely used.
So, where does this leave Linux? There are:
- No arabized GUI for Linux at all, which makes me still use a dual boot to get Arabic.
- No good arabized browsers under Linux either.
- Microsoft is gaining a virtual monopoly on a whole culture of 22 or so countries!
I am still using Netscape for e-mail and browsing (even on Windows, and fed up with its problems!), but have to use MS IE for browsing Arabic web pages! Sad!I have some links on Arabic on the web (scroll to the bottom of the page on what is available for Arabic on the net.
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Have you checked out Muslim Investor?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I can see the PR people when they get ahold of this:
"Linux, the official OS of the largest democracy in the world. Get yours today."
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
I think most would agree that while English remains the de-facto language of technology, a great need for locale support exists.
Many disciplines benefit from contributors who do not speak or read English. Mathematics comes immediately to mind; a significant portion of development in pure mathematic research stems from Russian speaking scientists. I'd hate to think how many advances would be lost to that community if support for that paticular locale wasn't widely available.
Open Source software definitely provides the best avenue for international support - reference the support of the Finnish government for Linux for educational use over Windows due to Microsoft's unwillingness to provide them with the proper langauge support.
Providing non-English speaking developers the power to support their local language is a prime reason for the power and popularity of Open Source. Diversity is often a Good Thing(TM). Open Source empowers that diversity in a big way.
So E is relatively prime to (P-1)(Q-1)... Odd, that.
Coin some new terms, add the words MP3, Linux and opensource (okay he didn't say it but I'm generalizing), connect them with some yarn and scotch tape and you've got a cool new Slashdot- approved infomative essay.
"Yet, India faces a peculiar problem in that almost all popular operating systems and applications packages are available only in English, a language which is spoken by a mere ten percent of the population."
(Let's not forget to mention that we are actually dealing with 42% of the population, 52% of india is literate, and it's a safe bet that all 10% who speak english are literate)
Virtually all high school educated people in india (=those who have enough money to buy a computer) have enough command of the english languge to use software, understand help bubbles etc. I am not saying that a high scool education should be a pre-req for using a computer; however a massive xlation project would cause too many splits; and not return on the money it would take to maintain and produce indian versions of all sorts of software (you realize how much there is? who deicdes what GPL software gets xlated?) and to maintain all the fun compatability issues that will happen.
"One development that can help India out of this deadlock is a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages."
Localise linux? Localizing the kernel and device drivers wouldn't do much good IMHO. Oh wait you mean all the software available for linux (most of it which it intended to run on many different unicies)?? Oh I get it...so you plan on xlating all GPL utilies (ssh, ls, mv, cron), their input and output file formats, display information, KDE, GNOME, all software documentation (what good is software if you don't know how to use it), error messages?...and keep up with anything that joe blow releases under GPL? The above proposal is just catagorically wrong.
"Linux is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify it to suit their own needs."
While Linux's development grwoth has stemmed from kernel hackers modifying linux at the base; it "phenomenal popularity" has nothing to do with it. Linux is a stable, free UNIX; one can run all sorts of wonderful wide-spread UNIX stuff on it, and use it as a solid server; that's why it is popular. In general, users do not modify linux beyond any other OS, changing drivers, installing libraries and applications, and system settings; everybody does this with every OS.
"The growth of content in platform-independent file formats (HTML, MP3 etc) has also reduced the dependence on a specific operating system, making Linux a viable option."
I can't think of any widely used content before html (really platform independant?) that was OS dependant. ASCII, UNICODE, gif, wav, jpg, etc. Linux is no more or less viable due to the fact that we are using platform independant content...we have generally always been. Application independant is another story, which would definately point to a negative for linux (for tools that would be in most general use wp's, spreadsheets, database creation tools etc...)
"The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh. "
Well assuming that the complaint is about the graphical representation of the underlying OS representation of files n' directories (which is the same as linux) under the Windows shell...under a graphical desktop environment (KDE/GNOME) of linux, they are represented the same way. And anyone could write a shell for either OS that pictured directories as books and pages or whatever...
"The openness of Linux (and other free operating systems like Free BSD) allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs."
The abstraction level at which UI software as described is as easily implimented under ,say, windows as linux. In terms of development, the UI really doesn't have much to do with the OS as any other application...linux isn't any more or less easily localizeable than any other OS.
I won't even get into cost issues, besides the fact that it is debatable...
To me, the article is just another "be cool, say linux" essay clone...but hell it might be a good a way of getting the government to get scared of not being cool and to pump some money in which can help some people. I suppose the only practical solution is to invest in language xlation research and come up with a good translator for the non-english readers.
You want India? Fine, it's yours. You Linux nutzoids are always thinking you've "gained more ground". Nevermind the fact that COMPUTERS are gaining more ground. Your percentage is going up, just your user base. Well, here's a scoop, MY userbase is going up too. How's that?!? In fact, more people start using Windows every day. And a lot more people start using it than switch over to your puny little OS.
You want India, it's yours. Most of them can't afford Windows 2000 licensing anyway. Of course, neither can the Americans, but we'll deal with that at a later point.
Have fun taking over a little insignificant country. Maybe I'll let you nuts open source mars... hmmph.
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
It would be even better to port the Indians to English.
Sure, they're not very portable, but with a little re-programming, they will even be able to get onto the internet. In addition, not only will they benefit from [cough]Open Source, but then they'll be able to use my wonderful Windows Products in English.
It will save a lot of work for my programmers, to not have to port Windows to another language, and they can use the free time to implement some other features I've been wanting. Security, stability, are a couple of features I've heard good things about. Platform independance sounds kinda neat, for hardware anyway...
Regardless, it is very important that you cease your efforts to port Linux to Indian languages, but rather port Indians to English..
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
(Score 5, Monopoly)
Have you tried my newest software? Microsoft.com
Obviously, all programming languages today are a subset of english with some punctuational and structual differences. A non-english speaking (reading) person confronted with a totally non-english computer environment will surely not have that much incentive learning english (not at least to operate his computer).
This way, if the person in question want to program his computer, how will he be able to do that ? Why not port C to punjabi ? it should be a matter of patching gcc, now wouldn't it ? This is just so cool!
return -ENOSIG;
Although many deny it, English dominates the languages of the world in terms of the power wielded by English-language speakers. I respect, and am, in fact, facinated by non-English languages. However, while Hindi support is definatly a plus for Linux, we need to keep in mind that the end goal is to open the possibility of communications between everyone, not one single group.