Hi all,
I snipped everything so I have a clean slate to put my thoughts.
First of all sorry if I came a bit hard on the localization bit but I
think its very important. How do we actualize and deliver it may be
the bigger problem.
Case in-point :-
I had gone to Mulshi Taluka couple of weeks back for some personal
stuff. From what little I know of this region its mostly of people who
make their living of the land (agricultural farmers) due to ample
rainfall and tourism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taluka_Mulshi
http://pune.nic.in/tourism/tou_MULSHI_007.htm
while using the services of the local State Transport
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharashtra_State_Road_Transport_Corporation)
was consciously or unconsciously watching some of the villagers and
townpeople using mobile phones.
Most of the people who were from the village seemed to know how to use
the interface in Marathi . It was some Nokia black and white model
which had both english and marathi/gurumukhi letters on it. The whole
UI was being used in the local language.
Now while this might be a one-off thing or not , few things came to my mind :-
a. People are usually comfortable with the first technology they use.
b. Localization could be a deal-maker for FOSS.
c. If people do make fonts and the surrounding infrastructure then
what's to stop proprietary software developers to take all that
knowledge and use it without spending the resources ? So need perhaps
stronger and viral licensing like GPL
d. Mobile phone makers like Nokia are proponents of IP (Intellectual
Property) . I do know that they are opening up with the Maemo stack
and everything but that's at the high-end, what about low and
medium-end ? Most of the strata would be in the Rs. 1000-3000 i.e. 80%
of the population if this has to be grown.
e. One of the last issues which came to my mind is also privacy .
Should Fosscomm say something about that ? I don't know.
For reference.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3DD1F3FF93AA3575BC0A9609C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
Looking forward for feedback.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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