Cambodia: Land of Open Source A welcome surprise in August 02's Cambodia Daily: 'Project Promises Free Khmer Software by 2006' an article on the Khmer Open Source Project by Matt Reed, detailing how Cambodia rewriting open source programs to operate in non-romanized language. They've already rewritten Open Office programs comparable to Word, Powerpoint, and a web browser (Firefox) and email program (Thunderbird). Thanks to these efforts, learning English is not a prerequisite to learning how to use a computer. It's quite an ambitious project; check the links below and you'll see that it involves an enormous amount of coding work. It looks like Cambodia is one of the leaders in translating this technology. But will people choose these new programs over their pirated Microsoft programs? In the States a copy of Frontpage costs over $100. Here at any CD shop it's $2 or less, bootlegged. But it's not in Khmer. Part of KhmerOS's priority is developing culturally appropriate images and terminology so that these programs will be easily adopted. Then people won't face the eventual challenge of paying exorbitant rates to license software, in a country where the average income is around $2 a day. They've got beta versions for download, as well as keyboard stickers and a shipment of Unicode keyboards on the way. And besides all this techie stuff, just look at the icons! Here's the browser, 'Mekhala', and 'Moyouriea' I'd buy a t-shirt if they make 'em! ------------------------------------------------ Khmer Operating System: www.khmeros.info Open Office: www.openoffice.org Khmer Operating System Conference report http://tinyurl.com/cezd9 Khmer Localization Case Study: http://www.knowprose.com/node/2385 Linux World News Article: http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/58/ NiDA: National Information Communications Technology Development Authority Javier Sola Profile http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/219 *KhmerOS Contribution Page*: do your part! http://www.khmeros.info/Khmeros_donations.html Tags: Open Source Cambodia

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