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Free Software In Iran, KDE In Farsi
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.)
Farsi is written RIGHT to LEFT. not the other way around. fix please
Now that the war in Iraq and Afganistan have died down... I see the KDE/Gnome wars are finally getting the front page /. attention they so deserve.
Am I the only one who read the summary and thought the description "the leading desktop environment" seemed to be included just to stir up trouble?
Disclaimer: I prefer KDE but really like Gnome config menus
Farsi is written from left to right.
!si ti egaugnul yzarc a tahw dna
http://www.flora.ca/floss.shtml
that such a concept as LINUX and free-software in all its spectrum of variants is becoming the choice of many dictatorial regimes that have no access to the microsoft and apple cadre of products....
is LINUX gonna be a troyan horse that brings freedom through software or a tool that will make tech savvy to many non-democratic states...
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
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.
farsi kde has been around for a while. ive been giving it to a lot of relatives to use when their computers go down because of virii, etc and they wish to use farsi. so yeah. this is good though. the majority of farsi software for windows ends up completley screwing up the computer. its usually virii infected and when you remove it the keymap doesnt restore properly leaving you with a well screwed computer.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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
To me, it did not seem that the term "the leading desktop environment" was used in an exclutinary manner - rather, it seemed that the intention was to explain what KDE is (to the occasional Windows-only user that happens upon /.)
Sort of like Ford, the leading auto maker (even though they are probably not the worlds largest).
-tor
PS. I use Gnome and WindowMaker. KDE is a bit too "all-or-nothing" for me.
Don't mean to be a pedant--but Farsi is actually an Indo-European language--meaning it's related to Latin, German, Spanish, etc (and Hindi!). You can see this in some cognate words--mother in Farsi is madar, father is pedar, brother baradar, etc.
.. very different).
Arabic is a semitic language, related to Hebrew. In Arabic these words are very different. (My Arabic is weak but mother can be "umm," father "ab"
Both languages do use the same basic script--the Arabic script, though Farsi does have several additional letters.
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).
Here's the Ethnologue entry for
Farsi and its position
in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best
single source for reliable information about where
languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
Well I know my saying for the next war, "No Blood For Proprietary Software"
forget it.
Well, according to the article, Iran is not a signer of the international copyright law. This means, as far as I understand (I'm no lawyer), that "copyright" as we understand it has no legal standing there.
I associate "free" and "open source" software with software made available under various licenses, i.e. pieces of legalese that use the power of copyright to control what can and cannot be done with the software. Now, if Iran's laws don't recognize even basic copyright for whatever reason, then surely these licenses are meaningless there, and everything can be legally copied in the eyes of local law?
From this perspective, I would be a bit catious as a free software (GPL licensed) author to actively support Irani users. I mean, if they give themselves the right to circumvent my license, and thus "steal" my software, why should I help them by making the software more attractive? Now, of course there is no monetary loss to me from limitless copying of software that is free to redistribute to begin with, but the different legal "flavor" of it all disturbs me somehow. Maybe it's just me being cheap, again. I think I need to meditate a bit over this.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Excuse me for being a pedant here. But the only reason the word "Farsi" has become current in English is because back in 50's, 60's, 70's neither the f_____g State Department nor the CIA knew that we had a perfectly good and venerable word in English for the language, i.e. "Persian." Listen, to anyone who knows the language (own horn tooting here) it sounds silly. It's completely mispronounced as it's employed in English, the accented syllable for one is just wrong. We don't say, "Do you speak francais?" (imagine it said with American accent, butcher the vowels, heavily glide the last syllable, clearly pronounce the "n"), and the same with any other language. Why? Because we already have perfectly good words for these languages in English. Calling it "Farsi" only highlights Western ignorance and it's exoticisation of the Eastern/Muslim/Oriental other. So why use it? Az kasi ke nedane va nedane ke nedane.... or words to that effect (if memory serves)
The sanctions in question date back to the crisis in 1980. They are, to my knowledge, a US-only affair, but hey, in the words of W, "You'r either with us or against us."
The point is that FOSS contributions ignore national boundaries, and this is not illegal. Currently if I (a US citizen) sell the rights to a book I wrote to a Dutch company, they are not bound by US export law and can sell that book in Cuba and Iran... However, I cannot sell the rights to a Cuban company.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Ports to languages like Farsi are interesting, but maintainers of applications really need to focus on Arabic, Hindi, whatever the primary Chinese used for computers is, Spanish and English. If your application ships with these languages, you cover your bases VERY nicely. Let localized distributions help you out on the smaller languages (*cough*klingon*cough*).
Don't get me wrong, I applaud these people for their work, but package maintainers can easily get caught up in a sort of fad around certain translations, and sometimes that hurts if the biggest languages are not covered well.
On another front, Gnome also supports right-to-left languages, so don't feel you have to chose KDE... choose whichever supports your needs best from an application standpoint.
... but the people of Iran, that might be another thing entirely.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Hmm, I admit I don't know much history of the Middle east from about 600AD 'till the renaissance, but I seem to recall that Persia (never called Persia!) spent a lot of time fighting Rome as a nation in decline, and then Rome started to decline.
Now look what you did, you've gotten me onto one of my longwinded ramble topics.
One of the problems people have with keeping the kingdoms in this area straight is that they tend to share the same name. Iran is simply the last in a sequence of little-related governments which have occupied the same area for several thousand years.
Persia as we know it - Iran - and the ancient/classical Persia share little more than their name between the two. The area known classically as the Persian Empire stretched from roughly the Indus River into the middle east, generally as far east as Iraq in Roman times, but during Greek times as far as modern Turkey and Egypt. That original Persian Empire began showing up in the mid-500s BC under Cyrus the Great, overthrowing what was left of the Babylonian kingdoms, a sequence of generally short-lived and ephemeral affairs running back almost, but not quite, into deepest antiquity.
(Even then, the ruling Achaemenid dynasty (which the kingdom was also named after) were from Media, a different region and culture within the area!)
Now, this particular Persian empire went down because of a young fellow named Alexander (y'might have heard of him) in the 330s-320s BC, and the whole region was ruled by a sort of pseudo-Greek monarchy for awhile. They were an attempt to impose a Hellenistic (NOT Hellenic, which is the democratic style most people know, but an absolute and militarist monarchy instead) veneer over the old Persian-style monarchy, and didn't do terribly much other than create a period of instability in the area for several generations as Alexander's "successors," and later their own successors, warred and plotted with one another. They were just starting to burn themselves out when the Romans came onto the scene in the west - and someone else in the east.
When people think of the particular Persian empire which tangled with Rome, they're thinking of the Arsacid monarchy, known at the time as Parthia. The Parthians hail from, well, Parthia, in the Iranian plateau, first started to chew at the Seleucid Empire's fragmented holdings around 250 BC and built up their own empire on top of the Hellenistic ones for the next century, before finally starting to tangle with the Romans in the first century BC. It was this Persian empire, the Parthians, which first started slapping the Romans around at battles such as Carrhae, Marc Antony's embarassing campaign in the east, and so on.
The Parthians soon tore themselves apart in dynastic squabbling, as well as having the major economic cities of the east torn apart in the great Roman invasions under the emperor Trajan. By 224 BC, a fellow named Ardashir came once again out of the east - in this case, if memory serves me, actually from the region of Persis/Farsis, proceeded to overthrow the Parthian empire, introduced several reforms in economics, military, and government, and became the first ruler of a very powerful, revitalized kingdom known today as the Sassanid or Sassanian Empire. This one is the Persian Empire you're thinking of, and fought a number of embarassingly successful campaigns against Rome, cumulating in the disaster of 260 when Shapur I actually captured the Emperor Valerian in battle. This empire continued along, doing very well for itself and being one of the great powers of the world, until the great Islamic wars of expansion blew out of Arabia. Pretty much nobody could stand against these guys, and the Sassanids were no exception, their last gasp being the Battle of Nehawand in 642 AD where their last great army was destroyed.
It's only by this date that an actual Islamic Persia exists, but it's still just the latest in a long string of Persias. The one now called Iran
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke