[Note, please read GNU/Linux instead of Linux below... since this refers to more than just the kernel. -FN]

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GNU/LINUX IN INDIAN LANGUAGES * Call for participation

We are a group of people who passionately believe that the benefits of information technology must be widely and freely available to the Indian masses. Our group consists of people who combine skills in written scripts, free/open source technologies, language experts and technology journalism to make this happen.

Why Indian languages ?

Today, almost all software and operating systems and websites in India are in the English language. Since English is a language spoken by less than 10 percent of India's population (generally considered to be the language of the affluent) language is a significant barrier for the other 90 percent of India.

This is creating a new class of people who live in what can be called as "Information Poverty" even as technology becomes cheaper and cheaper. To destroy this barrier we need to create a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages.

Why Linux ?

The openness of Linux allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs. We therefore believe that Linux is a very attractive long-term solution to India's computing needs.

We believe that information technology in India in general and Linux in particular has been confined to the 3 % of the Indian population who feel comfortable reading, speaking and writing English. Given that there are 1 billion Indian citizens, this is a scandal. Linux and its ecology encompass almost all areas of computing today from small embedded devices and clusters with thousands of nodes. We believe that Linux technology should be accessible to all Indians, regardless of linguistic background.

How can I participate ?

Localising the user interface of Linux to all the 18 official Indian languages will involve changing the menus and help-text to Indian languages and creating a whole stack of applications and tools (word processors, browsers, spell-checkers etc.) to enable computing in Indian languages.

To achieve this goal we are looking for people with either of the two skills (if you have both these skills, that's fantastic!):

Technical skills: The project needs a variety of technical skills in variety of programming languages (C/C++/Java/Perl) and platforms such as X-Windows GNOME,KDE, font development, application development , locale support etc.

Language skills: You must be fluent with the script of at least one Indian language and be willing to contribute to the task of Indianising the menus and help text of Linux. We request linguistic user groups and patriotic individuals to come forward and help us in this task.

Join in at www.indlinux.org

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Ongoing Indianisation Projects

Indian Linux Project , IndLinux.org - http://www.indlinux.org Project page on SourceForge - http://www.sf.net/projects/indlinux Main Focus : Complete language enablement at all levels, building a fully Indian language supported Linux distribution ( http://www.indlinux.org/distro ).

Indic Computing Project - http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net Project page at SF - http://www.sf.net/projects/indic-computing The Indic-Computing project is a central resource for the Indian language developer community, featuring information on Indian language computing issues and providing a forum where standards can be discussed and evolved. The project intends to serve the community by collecting information on the various aspects of Indian language text processing in one place, and publishing this in the form of a freely accessible handbook. http://indic-computing.sf.net/handbook/index.html

Linux Localisation Initiative - http://lli.linux-bangalore.org Project page of SF - http://www.sf.net/projects/lli Main Focus : Translation of LDP documentation , esp HOWTOs in all Indian languages Language Teams

Bengali http://www.bengalinux.org

Gujarati http://www.indlinux.org/gujarati

Hindi http://www.indlinux.org/hindi

Kannada http://kannada.sourceforge.net/

Malayalam https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc

Marathi http://www.indlinux.org/marathi

Oriya http://www.indlinux.org/oriya

Punjabi http://punjabi-linux.sf.net/, http://www.indlinux.org/punjabi/

Tamil http://www.tamillinux.org/

Telugu http://www.indlinux.org/telugu

Others (add you mother tongue) http://www.indlinux.org/otherlang.php

Other Projects NCST Indix http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix

BharateeyaOO - OpenOffice in Indian Languages http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo

IITM IndLinux http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/

[If you know anyone who can be a potential contributor, please pass on this message.]