Slashdot Mirror
Ask the Egyptian Installfest Organizers
The Linux-Egypt group recently held an amazingly successful installfest. This event was a milestone both for Linux installfests in general (was it the largest one ever held?) and for Linux in the Arabic world. Alaa Abd El Fatah, one of the organizers, has offered to answer your questions with help from other Linux-Egypt members. We'll post their answers to 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as we get them back.
http://www.pug.bz:9876/~gupta_p/installfest/
Here is some background, based on experience of relatives living in Egypt. I am Egyptian myself, but have not been living there for 15+ years.
...etc.) More importantly, this led to many web sites showing correctly in Arabic ONLY when used Internet Explorer.
In the 90s, Microsoft turned a blind eye to piracy. They simply did not care what happens in the Arab world (software wise). They ignored that market. Arabization of products normally followed a delayed schedule, with the latest product being not in Arabic. When Windows 3.x came out, there was a competing Arabization by Al Alamiah, a Kuwaiti company. The lead architect (cant' remember his name, but either Lebanese or Syrian) there was enticed into leaving Al Alamiah and join Microsoft. There was a brief law suit then. In the end Microsoft was dominant in the Arabization area. Product release in Arabic still lagged behind English and other Western languages.
Then, in the mid 90s, Microsoft started to enforce licenses on businesses. In Egypt, a newly formed Shortet El Mosanafat El Faneyya (literally: Artistic Products Police, more like: "Intellectual Property Police") started raiding large, medium and small businesses to check if their software was licensed. They specifically looked for certain products and ignored others (e.g. Microsoft stuff, AutoCAD in Engineering firms, Oracle, but not Novel [if I remember correctly], nor Apple).
Rumor at the time had it that some rich and powerful people (ruling elite) made a cut with Microsoft in all this.
Remember that the US Dollar was around 3.4 Egyptian pound at the time. Making legal software very costly for the small business.
This scared small businesses, and some relatives I know migrated from Microsoft Windows and Fox Pro applications to Linux and SQL-Ledger for example. There was so much resentment for Microsoft at the time for doing this, and the powers who enforced it.
Now, the exchange rate is about 6.5 Egyptian Pounds to 1 US Dollar, so it has gotten even worse (more prohibitive cost of Microsoft software).
However, in the internet land, another development was taking place around the turn of the Millenium. Many developers for the internet knew nothing but Microsoft, so they used its technologies to develop web sites (ASP, MS SQL, NT/2000/XP,
This means that people at home or in offices who do not have Windows and IE will not be able to interact properly with web sites. Al Jazeera web site for example shows only the middle pane in FireFox, and the side menus are only visible under IE.
Arabs are around 300 million, is supposed to be the 5th most widely spoken language in the world. For a company to gain a monopoly on an entire culture is simply wrong and unacceptable, but it did happen.
the bright side is that Linux is making some inroads. But there are obstacles (e.g. Arabic web sites which are IE centric, as above).
Yes, boycott of American products may have played a role since 2000 (with the Palestinian uprising, then the post-Sept 11 events). But more pragmatic factors were there far before any of this came into play, and Microsoft was (and still is) not liked by many (just like the rest of us Open Source advocates in the West do not like thm either).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I know you are joking, but here are some answers anyway.
What do Egyptian nerds wear? Black horn-rimmed kaffiyehs?
Most Egyptians wear western style clothes. Hollywood's stereotype of pyramids, desert, turbans, and camels not withstanding.
What's the ancient heiroglyph for "FR15T P05T!?"
By taking the English geekspeak letters FR15T P05T!? and translating them into the hieroglyph equivalent. We got a French guy called Champollion to help us there.
Seriously, Egypt now speaks Arabic. Hieroglyphs have been out of general use for about 22 centuries or so.
Do Egyptian nerds survive off of Cheetos and Mountain Dew, or is it more like big mouthfuls of qat and Pyramid Dew?
Qat is not consumed in Egypt. It is almost exclusively a Yemeni thing. Confused Geography again?
Is Pyramid Dew a new thing there that I missed?
What kind of beer do Egyptian nerds drink?
Most would not drink beer, because most do not consume alcohol. However, there is Fayrouz and all its flavors (non alcoholic beer like beverage, with many flavors).
How do you keep all the fucking sand out of your case mods?
By not living in the desert to begin with. That is why we have cities!
Do you have "Type-R" camels? Do you have low-rider camels with neon on their nuts?
Repeat after me: Camels are there only for retired American tourists who visit the Pyramids. Oh, and they are made into shish kebab as well!Not very common, but those who tried it say it is good.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
how many females are involved with the open source crowd, and in the IT industry in general, in Egypt?
I can answer that paritally at least.
There are as many women as men (if not more) in Egypt in the IT industry.
I know, because when I worked in Egypt back in the 80s, the IT department I was in had more females than males, from data entry to programming to management. About the only place that did not have females was the mainframe operations (requiring late shifts and such).
This was a governmental organization, and they had more perks for women than men (nice vacation on giving birth, right to go back to same or similar position, leave early to nurse the baby, take unpaid leave to care for kids, ...etc.)
Even in the private software development sector, their seem to be more women than men (I know because my wife worked at such a place, and that is again back in the 80s).
In university, you see about a 50/50 gender split in computer science, if not more women.
Yeah, this info is a bit dated, but at least provides some historical data. Don't think it has changed much since.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You must mean the internet cafes.
Yes, they are everywhere, because many people do not have computers at home.
They are almost exclusively Windows (did anyone here about a net cafe using Linux in Egypt?)
The reason is that is what people are used to, and that is what supports Arabic the most.
If they install Linux, then Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger and ICQ will not be able to do voice and video for example.
I would like to hear the answer on what the government is doing too.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I am an English-speaker living in Sweden. I can tell you it's a combination of:
Of course, you can't discount the fact that they spend their whole education studying it. However, as an English-speaker trying to learn Swedish, I find it intensely annoying that Swedes refuse to speak Swedish to you if they know you speak English.