Japanese Govt Boosts OSS Developments

Final Samurai writes "Information-technology Promotion Agency(IPA, in pdf), an extra-departmental organization of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan has been supported open source software development. Some efforts are now available: framework for printing, Samba internationalization, a tool for hacking Gtk+, ssh in Java, manuals for OpenOffice.org, and GRASS internationalization. Though IPA doesn't announce the support program strongly, we can find the name, `IPA' in each project page. Does your government have such a plan to fund OSS developments? How do you think about governments' funding OSS developments(by tax)? If you have a chance to be funded, what kind of software will you develop?"

Comments

Goverment funded OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that the the french government is increasingly pushing free software.The police will soon use OpenOffice as the official suite.An hardened version of Mandrake Linux is beeing used in the army and the standard Mandrake Linux in some part of the administration.Well, Id'l like to see gnu/linux used in other places than army and police, but there are many others examples. Goverment support gives OSS a lot of credibility.

Israeli govt funding OOo localization

[Yonoz]

With a budget of 240,000 NIS it's a small step but one in the right direction. http://www.maor.gov.il/english/open_office.asp

m17n

[pamri]

The m17n library funded by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan is probably, IMO the most exciting thing to come out of the whole process.

The m17n library allow you to view and type complex text languages like Indic, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages. While this is possible by using QT3.2+ & GTK2.0+pango, this restricted one to just 2 toolkits and to two heavyweight desktops(XFCE4 is the exception though). The library is also a good compromise between a toolkit dependent solution like pango/QT3.2 and Server based solutions like the doomed Indix and STSF.

The screenshots here show firefox and magicpoint, applications that use different toolkits displaying multilinugal texts. I have even seen but not used windowmaker rpms compiled with m17n support.

A very practical example would be something like Damn Small Linux, which is a pretty lightweight live CD in both disk size (~50 MB) and Memory usage (runs on 64 MB RAM). This was ideal for a school near my place that wanted to use it as a teaching resource but wanted it in their native language. I finally am settling for XFCE4 and GTK2 applications like OO.o, Firefox.

The keyboard solutions were too rudimentary, in the case of xkb for phonetic keymaps for indian languages or too buggy and complex, in the case of IIIMF. M17n was a joy to use from day one and rpms for Mandrake 10.1 & debs for Ubuntu/Debian unstable are available.

Re:Contrast Japan with Brazil

[HishamMuhammad]

Your portrayal of the situation in Brazil is at the very least unfair.

The Brazilian government is spending on developing the code base that will save them millions, but I'm sure government management software does not make Slashdot headlines like "a tool for hacking GTK+". Migrating to a Free Software platform does not involve only installing Linux distros; migrating the actual systems that run on top of the platform is the most substantial work.

Brazilian involvement with Free Software started in my home state, Rio Grande do Sul, where the state government started a big push for free software in its IT agency. The systems of the state's public bank were migrated to free software, and its very pleasant sight to see Tux in the ATM's wallpapers. Incidentally, it is also in Rio Grande do Sul that the International Forum on Free Software takes place (and where the World Social Forum was created). The party who was in state government when these initiatives took place has now won the federal elections, so these developments are now starting to take place in national scale. Brazil spends billions every year in proprietary software licenses -- yes, spend money installing free software is a great move, especially in the long run.

In my personal experience as a Brazilian from Rio Grande do Sul, I can say that the development of a culture of Free Software there is as important as funding coding. The Forums served as a great incentive to the FS project I'm involved with, the GoboLinux distribution, a project born in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It was also in the Forums that I was exposed to another Brazilian Free Software project, the Lua language, which I now took part in my MsC project, funded by -- you guess -- the Brazilian government. So there's your "big project the Brazilian government funded on FOSS". Of course, we could use more research grants, but that's a more general problem of low incentive to science R&D (a recurring problem in the so-called Third World). At least, now, the grants are given by the government with the explicit condition that research results are made available under an OSI-approved license. To me, that's a great thing.