The Hindu : Kerala News : `Malayalam software development hit'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 19, 2004

Kerala

Kerala

`Malayalam software development hit'

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, JULY 18. The activists of Free Software Foundation of India have said that the lack of standards in matters such as keyboard layout, encoding and sorting is hampering the development of software in Malayalam.

Talking at a press conference here today, the activists, G. Nagarjuna, M. Arun and V. Sasikumar, said that crores of rupees spent on software development in local languages were being wasted for want of standards in Indian languages. However, standards had long been established in some languages such as Tamil, they said.

They said that this was a matter in which the Government should be taking the initiative so that there would be a standard for all software developers to follow.

"A situation should not come to pass when a company would tell us how to use Malayalam," Mr. Sasikumar said.

Mr. Nagarjuna said that public data should not be allowed to be encoded in proprietary format. Instead, open document standards should be used, they said.

Mr. Arun suggested that the Indian Government take the lead in collaborating with countries such as Brazil and Italy in developing software needed for e-governance programmes on a free software platform.

Kerala could become a centre for development of such technology, he said. Mr. Arun said that the Foundation would be celebrating its third anniversary on July 21. Free software developed in Malayalam would be displayed at the VJT Hall on that day.

This would include a set of applications in Malayalam called Sopanam, educational application and free geographical information system and related applications (GIS-Morphix).

The Open Access Initiative, which stands for free availability of scientific literature and Creative Commons licences, would also be showing some of their short Hindi films and other works.

The Initiative is an extension of the concept of social ownership of knowledge propagated by the free software movement.

The Creative Commons licences permit people to use works of art and literature without severe restrictions.

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