(Jim/Eric, when it comes to co-ordinating between the projects you two are the most visible face of opensolaris.org and hence am marking a copy of this mail to you. Please read through)
Hi All, I was pleasantly surprised to see Jim's blog saying "The India OpenSolaris Community http://in.opensolaris.org"; (http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/india_opensolaris_portal_opens). The announcement should probably go to all the other Indian user groups (not sure how many are there). Whoever has the bird's view here should be able to do it. I visited the site and I must say that I was quite disappointed. The entire website is in Hindi a language using which I can manage to converse, but would find it very difficult to read/write. Going through the site reminded me of my school days where I barely managed to clear my hindi exams :-) And I can safely say that I represent a good majority of Indian populace. For one, majority of the bosug members might find it not usable. Instead of Hindi if it had been in *Kannada*(official language of Karnataka state) I would have found it very convenient to browse through. What does this mean ? Here is some background for the unitiated : India has over 22 "official languages" (as per constitution). There is no national language status accorded to any single language. All union government departments communicate in Hindi. The Supreme court uses English for its proceedings. All state government departments have their own official language of communication based on what is predominantly in use in the state. Hindi is used for written communication predominantly in the country's capital and a handful of states in and around the capital. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_languages_of_India) If http://in.opensolaris.org is about creating providing local language support in OpenSolaris and creating documentation, then the opening page should be in English and point to additional pages for the different languages where the people interested can participate. The link names in the front page can be in English and one another Indian language as per the link (Chandan's opensolaris odp template page is a hint). If it is about providing an opensolaris.org website to the Indian population, it has been misguided since this site will be usable by only a small portion of the population. By the way, I did catch a typo in the first word that I read on the page. ??????????? (OpenSolarsi) should have been ??????????? (OpenSolaris) cheers Shiv
