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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.
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Prof. Venkatesh Hariharan is with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. He can be reached at venky@iiitb.ac.in.
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
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...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
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
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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.
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
Uh, English is the official language of India. (Along with Hindi, IIRC) About 10% of the population can speak it. Official government business is done in English(I think), just as in the US.
Also, just about any language can be written in roman characters. Take Chinese for examplewo mei you wenti, ne kan ma?
The first Operating System to have good support for a non-romaniform language will be a big step in the history of computers,
Wow, you're way behind the times then, aren't you? From where I'm sitting windows supports non-romaniform languages perfectly well. Take Chinese for example: ÎÒ ÃÓÐ ÎÊÌâ, Äã Âí? If your running m13 (with the Chinese character set) you should be able to see that (IE5 supports unicode input, but not multiple character sets in one page mozilla does. But I don't know what slash is doing ether), maybe. I could also write in Japanese, Arabic, Korean, or anything else I felt like. I don't know where Linux is in this capability, but windows is already there.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco