Date:20/07/2004 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/07/20/stories/2004072002301900.htm

Back Free software in Malayalam

Our Bureau

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Free Software Foundation India has attributed the delay in the development of free software in Malayalam to non-existence of benchmarks in areas such as keyboard layout, encoding and sorting.

Free software campaigners, Mr G. Nagarjuna, Mr M. Arun and Mr V. Sasikumar, told newspersons here that the huge amount of money being spent on software development in local languages was being thus wasted. This was, however, not true for all Indian languages. For instance, such standards had long been established for Tamil.

This was something that was best tackled at the Government-level so that there would be some standard parameters that all software developers would perforce have to follow. According to Mr Nagarjuna, public data should not be allowed to be encoded in a proprietary format. Instead, open document standards should be used.

Mr Arun suggested that the Government of India 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.