Africa Source 2004 Wrap-ups

Douglas Hunter writes "Africa Source 2004 has wrapped up and the last of the stragglers have packed their bags and headed home. Africa Source 2004 was a gathering of pan-African Free and Open Source software developers held in Okahandja, Namibia. Organized by Tactical Tech, All Africa and Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), Africa Source was a mixture of structured and semi-structured discussions with loads of good 'ole hacking thrown in to boot. With workshops ranging from i18n to wireless hacks to running a MOSIX cluster, there were plenty of hands-on sessions for folks to attend. The first ever Kiswahili spell checker was developed and released during the conference, a testament to the activity of those involved. For more information about Africa Source 2004, visit one of the blogs."

Comments

Make the stand against artificial scarcity

[Thinkit4]

In a region where artificial scarcity of AIDS drugs (patents) kills--any sort of stand against "intellectual property" is a good thing.

Re:Make the stand against artificial scarcity

[azaris]

In a region where artificial scarcity of AIDS drugs (patents) kills--any sort of stand against "intellectual property" is a good thing.

It's intellectual dishonesty to claim that Africa's AIDS problem is due to intellectual property rights.

Lack of education, lack of free contraceptives and lack of a properly managed international effort to organize these things are what's causing the problem. And the US policy of only supporting programs that preach abstinence isn't helping either.

Re:Make the stand against artificial scarcity

[hachete]

The Americans didn't help by trying to reduce to a minimum the circumstances - proscribed by international convention - in which forced licensing could legally take place. So, whilst the original poster can be described as overstating their case, I don't see this as being "intellectually dishonest". Rather, I see your deflection in this light. The US drug companies were complete bastards in this respect and I can understand the feelings engendered by such a negative, hateful policy.

h

Corporations vs. Open Source

[jabex]

That's one of the I like about open source. Where a megalo-corporation would do it's best to stay away from a possible African market... people that have the resources the can work together to produce their own products.

If only open source could produce food... hmm.

Re: Africa Source 2004 Wrap-ups

[manavendra]

Its heartening to hear about pan-African open source initiative. The implications of this are enormous.

• This shows there is a fairly large developer community, which is informed and competitive enough to be a part of the open source initiative, as against merely working to earn.
• That, the efforts from these developers shall sooner or later bring revenue for the African economy. With the outsourcing initiatives already filling coffers of other econonomies all over the world, I don't see why stable African countries should not be benefited.
• All such initiatives provide an example and direction to the youth - not all of them have the guidance and help they need, and such initiatives provide some inkling that perhaps there might be some prosperity in software.
• This further chips away at the belief that Africa is about poverty, aids and civil wars only. I agree all these exist, but education can help eradicate these to a large extent.
• Finally, such initiatives may prompt the government to provide more funding to the software companies association/education institutions to develop and promote the industry, attracting foreign investment (read outsourcing)

Open source, localisation

[heironymouscoward]

Africa has easily the most complex localisation problem of any market, with more languages than the rest of the world combined but a market that can hardly afford traditional localization costs (e.g. the top down model used by commercial vendors).

Open source makes it possible to build entire packages - OS, Office, Web - for groups that are not even on the commercial software radar.

It's true that for many educated Africans, a European language is a necessary skill - French, English, Portuguese. But for a schoolkid in Kasai, it has to be Chiluba or Lingala.

Long after the problems of internetworking and materials have been resolved, open source will be the basis for widespread adoption of software in African society.

Problems with Swahili Spell Checking

[chris_notts]

I'm surprised that the spell checking code in Open Office is flexible enough to cope with Swahili spell checking, given how different the european languages it was designed to handle are from the bantu languages (eg swahili) in structure. European languages generally have rather poor derivational morphology, and nouns and verbs inflect by taking a single suffix only. Compare this to Swahili, where verbal derivational morphology is quite rich, and the verb takes a tense prefix along with subject and object concord prefixes, and a mood suffix... I would have expected the spell checking code to choke when they tried to specify which prefixes a verb can take in which order, etc. An example to prove my point, with the english and swahili sentences broken down into their constituent parts: English: I read it (the book) Cannot be broken down Swahili: nakisoma ni-a-ki-som-a I:subj-simple:present-it:ki:class-read-indicative English: He who leaves He who leave-s Swahili: anayetoka a-na-ye-tok-a 3p:subj-present-3p:relative-leave-indicative And so on. There are very few english, french or spanish (languages I speak a little of as well) words which approach this level of agglutination, the obvious example being antidisestablishmentarianism.

I was there...

[nicc777]

...to present the clustering workshop :)

We actually played with ClusterKnoppix and CHAOS. I have made my presentation and other notes available at itfirms.co.za for those interested.

I just want to say thanks to everyone for making it a great experience. I made a lot of new friends, and I look forward to the next event.