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

Not too bad

[soniCron88]

"How do you think about governments' funding OSS developments(by tax)?"

It wouldn't be much different than the library system. Sharing knowledge for "free" is never a bad thing.

Pandering to the Chinese?

[shanen]

Well, not sure how far they'll really go with it, but I feel like their motivations are suspect. The Japanese government has pretty much made peace with Microsoft. The only reason I can see for them supporting OSS is because the Chinese seem to be going away from MS, and Japan is thinking about who's going to be most important to Japan a few years down the road.

Think of it as another form of distributing their investments away from dollars...

Re:Pandering to the Chinese?

[RoLi]

Why is every positive Linux movement badmouthed?

It doesn't matter why they did it, also being at "peace" with Microsoft doesn't prevent you from supporting Linux. The important fact is that they did a big Linux commitment and that that commitment is helping all Linux users.

Government should not be funding OSS

[Shivetya]

Unless it is under contract to provide an immediate service that is needed. Just putting money out there for funding development would be wrong and we would have nothing more than the waste of taxpayer money that funds "art".

In other words, if there is a purpose/need for the software then by all means fund it under contract for that purpose. This could include changing educational programs to only use OSS for teaching of students on how to program. If however the reason is just to buy votes, keep unemployed "artists" from starving, or there is no need then do not use the taxpayers dollars on it.

I just want to avoid a situation like what we have here in Georgia where one local county spent more on art than their roads. Boy does it show. Want to find a government building - just look for the ugly art or a building that looks more expensive than a bank. I used to think it was just a saying.

As a citizen I am concerned

[briancnorton]

Not to disrespect the OSS developer, but I have serious concerns about the level of professional financial management that these projects have. I don't want my tax-dollars going to buy a foosball table for an OSS company that will go out of business before their product is delivered. No offense, but follow-through has been a serious problem for OSS. Look at how many projects in freshmeat are at at version 0.5 and haven't been touched in a year.

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.

OSS != Linux

[mamladm]

With all due respect, you are talking nonsense.

First, the IPA does not expressly support Linux. Its progam is to further the use of open source software in Japan. And in fact you will find that many government sponsored research projects in Japan are based on BSD and not Linux. A prominent example is the KAME project (IPsec and IPv6).

Second, Apple has embraced open source software and it is supporting and contributing to open source projects. Some of the work Apple is contributing directly supports otherwise Linux centric projects, for example KHTML.

Also, it should not be forgotten that Apple sponsored and contributed most of the work on MkLinux. In any event, the impression you try to create with your wording, that Apple is in one boat with Microsoft in resisting open source is nothing more than spin.