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Free Software In Iran, KDE In Farsi

Posted by timothy on from the pretty-screenshots dept.

Elektroschock writes "KDE, the leading *nix desktop environment, is translated to Farsi (=Persian). Now native language KDE can be used in Iran as well. Farsi is written from left to right. Full story at Dot KDE. Arash Zeini (KDE Farsi) wrote an intresting article about FLOSS in Iran. His view: "It is not a secret anymore that FLOSS is gaining momentum all over the world. We witness an international move and acceptance of FLOSS in the private as well as in the public sector."" Update: 12/29 16:37 GMT by T : That should read "Farsi is written from right to left." (Thanks to Thomas Zander for pointing that out.)

3 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. Farsi is Right to Left by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From the website:

    Farsi, like most middle-east languages, appears to be written right-to-left -- the same as our numbers are -- When the original algebra texts from Persia were translated, the translator kept the right to Left form of the numbers (little-endian). This is the reason for the big-endian / little-endian dicotomy in modern day computers -- we've been writing our numbers backwards for the last thousand years!

    --
    Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  2. How to make a system bilingual? by GerardM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would like to know how to use two languages on one system so that I have a Farsi environment or an English environment at will.

    I have many friends, among them Iranians, Turks and Israeli, who would like to have a bilingual system. Multiple keyboards are also an issue. Preferably it would need a switch to go from one language to the next alternatively a reboot would be acceptable.

    Any ideas, resources that I might look at?

    Thanks,
    Gerard

  3. Heading trolls off at the pass. by theolein · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can well imagine that, as with any article on /. relating to anything not understood/foreign/not american there will be a fairly high noise to signal ratio around here. So, I thought I could mention that Farsi (written from right to left in a modifed Arabic script) is an Indoeuropean language with no relation whatsover to Arabic, apart from the script (The Alphabet for those who think that script means VBS or Perl) and loan words.

    Iran, with its odd mix of religious and democratic government (The religious side seems to be making it very hard for the elected officials to do anything), also has an interesting approach to copyright. According to Islamic law If I understand it correctly(), God is the source of all invention and creation and therefore the holder of all copyright. That means that things like MS anti-piracy drives are unknown there, as practically everything is pirated.

    While it certainly is an interesting way of looking at things, I can see countries like the US (surprise, they don't get on well with the Iranians) making it very difficult for the Iranians ever getting into the WTO because so called IP has no value there (Read: Britney will not make much cash on CD sales in Teheran and the Matrix 2&3 will flop just as it did in the west, but for other reasons).