[sandGorgon]

One of the big reasons that China or India (which might be linguistically closer) is not a hotbed for Linux innovation is because of the linux leadership. Hold more conferences here, incorporate features required for a non-Roman script market and see it explode. FYI - every known computer maker sells OS-free machines: both because the local piracy driven market demands it and that a lot of people use Linux as an alternative to Windows (India Dell level 2 customer support will answer Ubuntu questions)

[w1ntermute]

> incorporate features required for a non-Roman script market

Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages. Everything's in English, and when people do write in an Indian language, it's using a bastardized, improvised romanization. So non-Roman script support is a non-issue.

[Derbasti]

Is that true? How interesting! How do you know this? Do you live in India?

[w1ntermute]

No, I'm American. Read about it on Wikipedia and some other sites. I'm a bit of an amateur linguist, so it's interesting to me (though also sad - the internet is the future, so without online usage, a language has no future).

India has so many languages that all official business is done in English. Since (just like in every other country) computers first appeared in big businesses, only English support was needed. The types of people working at those companies are fluent in English. Most of them went to English-medium schools ever since kindergarten. All of the universities are English-medium, so if you don't learn everything in English from when you're little, you'll never stand a chance in the hypercompetitive university entrance exams.

This made computer adoption very easy - just get some American computers and you're good to go. No time wasted localizing anything. Localization would have been a huge problem in India (a much bigger problem than China) because there are so many languages, and they all have a different script. A veritable nightmare for computer vendors - how many types of keyboards do you have to stock and keep track of? In the cities (where computers appeared first), there would be people from all over the country, speaking and writing all kinds of different languages. There's no one language that everyone knows that you can standardize on.

In China, OTOH, the strong, authoritarian central government made sure that everyone was educated in one language (Mandarin), and even if they weren't, the same script is used by all the languages (since it's character-based, not phonetic-based). This means that all business in China is conducted in Mandarin, and of course, nationalistic fervor wouldn't have allowed computers to simply remain unlocalized. Moreover, the phonetic pinyin input system doesn't require keyboard localization, so the Chinese just use American keyboards as well.

[sandGorgon]

You are close to the answer, but not quite there.

You see a lot of government work has to be done in the vernacular ( by political necessity) - and the defacto tool for written communication happens to be Word. Now, I have been trying to (as part of Accountability Initiative and other egov channels) get the govt to adopt open source alternatives like OpenOffice. But the problem is that complex Indic languages are NOT a priority for either Gnome or KDE (and frankly dont work that well on Linux). For example, the Harfbuzz project mentions somewhere For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType. Graphite is of course, the Indic compatible smartfont technology. Again, I might be completely wrong by way of technology, but the fact remains that the world's fastest growing computing market doesnt have significant linux mindshare. Very sad considering tha it is very very easy to do that in India.. much more than Europe or America, where you have to de-Apple people.

What really, really hurts me though is the fact that a significant (>70%) number of Indian colleges teach programming in Borland C. Why ? well it is easy to blame our cultural proclivity to resist change - but the easier answer is that they dont know any better. Remember, India does not have a significant amount of internet penetration: Network effects happen more due to physical communities rather than electronic ones .

Asia (and especially India) is at the cusp of an open-source revolution just because we cant afford anything else. Come over and start one.

[w1ntermute]

> the problem is that complex Indic languages are NOT a priority for either Gnome or KDE

I think you have the wrong attitude with regards to this matter. In an open source project, the priorities are what the developers (or the people paying them) are interested in. If Indians want things to be changed wrt localization support in FLOSS, then they must take the initiative to do it themselves.

Do you think it was easy for the Chinese to get ~50,000 characters into Unicode? It made the font tables absolutely enormous, and so UTF-8 is much more verbose than ASCII. But they knew they wanted Chinese language support, and they did the work to get it.

So if there is sufficient interest from sufficiently influential people, things can be done very easily in open source.

[sandGorgon]

My comment was not meant to change the direction of anything or to disparage the efforts of a community which helps me earn a living.

It was simply to illustrate that linux is not yet an alternative to piracy.

[loxs]

I live in Bulgaria. The official script here is Cyrillic. Although all OSs support Cyrillic, the vast majority of users use the so called 'shlyokavitsa' - using ASCII to write in Bulgarian, which (as expected) is not very suitable for the purpose. The result is extremely low quality (and hard to read) text. And yet, this is probably 90% of the talk in chats, facebook and other venues where 'ordinary' people interact. I have friends who are Arabs and they do the same (though, they at least have a good excuse as computers around here don't have Arabic keys). I have no reasons to believe that the situation in India is any different. Some countries go even further, and make Latin their second official script. This is the situation in Serbia at the moment (Cyrillic and Latin).

[gaius]

The official languages of India are Hindi and English. All government business and most commerce and tech is done in English. You have to remember that what looks like "India" on a map was hundreds of smaller territories unified by the British Empire, and each had its own dialect. It would be impossible to support all of them.

[rmc]

I've been to parts of Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia) promoting Linux. Except for Ethiopia all languages there are written in ASCII, and English (or French) is sometimes the official state language and commonly spoken. However Windows is still massively used and massively pirated.