[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.