Iran: Even If Windows Is Free, Linux Is Preferred

gpwiki.org writes "Iran, a country which does not abide by international copyright law, is reportedly moving toward Linux. 'All the software in Iran is copied. There is no copyright law, so everybody uses Microsoft software freely,' said the secretary of Iran's High Informatics Council. 'But we cannot continue like this much longer.' The article suggests that a desire to enter the WTO, and Windows security issues are prime motivating factors. 'Microsoft is a national security concern.'"

Comments

Re:The WTO move is the prime incentive

[saden1]

I'm sorry but I think the Iranians have capable developers that can full and quickly grasp all the subsystems of Linux. With state funding it is not hard to get top notch developers working on their own flavor of Linux. It doesn't take a genius to manage code change either. It's a simple get latest, inspect the changes made and incorporate the change into your codebase. I would also like to point out that a large percentage of engineers in the IT field are foreign born. You underestimate the competence of the world outside your own. Might also want to note that Iran is one the better nations in terms of mathematics even with its limited resources.

Re:It's about GAMES

[Surye]

http://unrealtournament.com/

UT2K4 and UT2K3. Linux install packaged.
Enemy Territory. released for both at the same time.

These are so popular, it makes me wonder is you've even looked. Please keep such uneducated, uninformed remarks to a minimum. You'd hate for someone to call it FUD.

Re:The WTO move is the prime incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Linus, Norwegian by heritage, now lives in comfortable quarters in Silicon Valley.

Finnish

Re:It's about GAMES

[Anonymous Coward]

Again with the gamers. You know, computing is not all about gaming. It's about other things like: networking, development, word processing, databases, and system administration. Linux holds its own in those departments.

Re:The WTO move is the prime incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost. He's Finnish-Swedish.

Re:It's about GAMES

[tolan-b]

Uh no, that's 3.

Doom3 Linux client is expected shortly too. Quake 3 linux client came out shortly after the windows version.

Yes there are certainly less mainstream games on Linux, but some of the biggest name ones to come out.

The HIC talk campaign goes on and on..

[a.ameri]

The High Informatics Coucil (HIC) is an organisation which has been talking for a couple of years now, about this Open Source thing, this Linux thing, and ect, but really they haven't done anything. They even don't have a clue what they are talking about.

I am an Iranian and I used to work for a company which was the first to start doing some Linux activities in Iran. We started by designing a keyboard layout for Persian, and when GTK 2.0 and Qt 3.0 were released and had enough Unicode support to enable us to write Persian using them, we started the FarsiKDE project http://www.farsikde.org and with the release of KDE 3.1, our small handicapped and fully underresourced team was able to add Farsi as an official language to KDE. Next step, we launched a community-driven website http://www.linuxiran.org to help build momentum around Linux in Iran. And then, we started building our own Debian-Based distribution called Shabdix, and it even had a couple fo limited releases. (all this was done in true Open Source fashion, free in both senses).

During all this time, the HIC did nothing to support us, althought they were fully aware of our program. The HIC is just so full of bearucracy, that it can't even decide what it wants to do, and which direction it wants to go. All they have done, with their massive resources and budget, is just publish a couple of already-available fonts as beta, and then also publish some meaningless Request For Comments to implement things that were implemented years ago (like UTF-8 support in toolkits such as Qt and GTK). They can't even decide on a standard keyboard layouy. The Persian Keyboard layout in Windows is a mess, it doesn't have comma, Persian numbers,... and the one in XFree86 is much better, but they can't even agree to use that keyboard layout. All these years, they have made many public announcements about deploying Linux systems in Iran, about how Linux is the future and blah blah, but they have yet to do a single meaningful action. And they failed to support the only group which was actually doing something and producing some actual code.

But Of course, they need to have the PR going, cause they need to get an increase in their budget next year, and well, PR is the best way to impress lawmakers to give them the budget. And Saying 'We won't even use Windows even if it was free' is certainly going to make headlines, and keep the PR machine going. While I personaly have been to HIC, and know that even they use pirated copies of Widnows all over the place, internaly.

Such a shame, so many resources is being wasted by this entity, for no use.

Re:The HIC talk campaign goes on and on..

[roozbeh]

Well, it's called HCI, not HIC. It's called "Request for Proposals", not "Request for Comments".

Anyway, I was among the original supporters and architects of the HCI Persian Linux (FarsiLinux) effort, but it's now far from under any kind of influence from me, and I don't approve most of their actions, I even agree that they don't understand the whole notion properly yet. But it has good effects, specially when they provide funds to companies who loved to work on Linux but couldn't hire good developers. They also have the courage to recommend Linux to the government and the corporations, which helps the evangelization effort. Just look at their home page (top left). Which government organization in the world has the courage to put a Tux logo on their first page?

The history you are mentioning, is partially false and partially incomplete. Just some examples:

• The whole effort of localizing Linux to Persian in a standard way was started before any company was interested in the matter, by Sharif University of Technology's computing center.
• The keyboard layout you are mentioning, which I assume is the one in XFree86 (latest version here), is not designed by any company. It's based on the Iranian standard ISIRI 2901, funded by the same HCI in 1998. It was I who provided the information to Rubert Brady, who then worked for SuSE, as you can see in the file's header. You can also see my Sharif email address there.
• The Windows keyboard layout is a mess, yes, simply because they did not have any contact with Iranian experts to tell them about the national standard, which was developed by HCI. HCI has already agreed to the layout, of course, or otherwise why should have them published it back in 1998?
• Shabdix, the distribution you are talking about, is actually Knoppix-based. HCI is also funding the Chapar Shabdiz company, the distributors of Shabdix, for their release 1.0. I don't recall the exact amount, but it was more than USD 25,000.
• You are mentioning that HCI is defining projects for adding UTF-8 support in Qt and GTK+. That's not so. They are asking for proper internationalization and localization of such programs and libraries. Some examples are: user-friendly bidirectional editing and display (which is very hard), proper display of Persian numbers (which use different shapes than common European ones known in the world as Arabic), proper support of Iranian calendar, etc.
• You are claiming that Chapar Shabdiz was the "only" producer of "actual code". Please show me the code generated by them, and compare it with the amount of code created by Sharif people (GNU FriBidi is just an example, co-maintained by me, used in Abiword and GNOME, and included in many distribution including Fedora and Mandrake). As far as I can tell, there is only one piece of code included in international Linux distributions created by Chapar Shabdiz, and that is the Iranian calendar support in KDE's PIM.

Re:It's about GAMES

[crackshoe]

i think america's army is also linux.