Re: An article for you from an Economist.com reader.

Hi Sam, I often browse content from the Economist.com that is how I found this particular article. But yes, I do have some headlines mailed
to me from news.google.com. You can define specific words and as they appear in the media it will send you an alert, ie. NetBeans.

- Rob -
>Robert-
>
>This is the article I wrote (edited by Tom Standage, Economist Tech
>Quarterly).
>
>I'm glad to see you picked it up.  How did you get it emailed to you? 
>Are you subscribed to certain content email triggers?
>
>Kind regards,
>
>-Sam Hiser
>
>
>On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 08:11, [email protected] wrote:
>>   - AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM - 
>>  
>> Dear  nbmarketing,
>> 
>> Robert Demmer ([email protected]) wants you to see this article on
>Economist.com.
>> 
>> The sender also included the following message for you:
>> 
>> Check out this article from the Economist
>> 
>> (Note: the information above has not been verified.)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> OPEN SOURCE'S LOCAL HEROES
>> DECEMBER 4TH 2003 
>> 
>> Software: If the commercial sort does not speak your language,
>> open-source software may well do so instead
>> 
>> ITS POPULARITY is growing around the world, but open-source software
>> has particular appeal in developing countries. In China, South Korea,
>> India, Brazil and other countries, governments are promoting the use of
>> such software which, unlike the proprietary kind, allows users to
>> inspect, modify and freely redistribute its underlying programming
>> instructions. The open-source approach has a number of attractions.
>> Adopting open-source software can reduce costs, allay security concerns
>> and ensure there is no danger of becoming too dependent on a foreign
>> supplier. But there is another benefit, too: because it can be freely
>> modified, open-source software is also easier to translate, or
>> localise, for use in a particular language. This involves translating
>> the menus, dialogue boxes, help files, templates and message strings to
>> create a new version of the software.
>> 
>> Large software vendors have little incentive to support any but the
>> most widely spoken languages. Microsoft, for example, provides its
>> Windows 2000 operating system in 24 languages, and Windows XP in 33.
>> The company also supports over 20 languages in the latest version of
>> its Office software suite. Yet for many languages, commercial vendors
>> conclude that producing a localised product is not economically viable.
>> 
>> The programmers who produce open-source software operate by different
>> rules, however. The leading desktop interfaces for the open-source
>> Linux operating system--KDE and GNOME--are, between them, available in
>> more than twice as many languages as Windows. KDE has already been
>> localised for 42 languages, with a further 46 in the pipeline.
>> Similarly, Mozilla, an open-source web browser, now speaks 65
>> languages, with 34 more to follow. OpenOffice, the leading open-source
>> office suite, is available in 31 languages, including Slovenian, Basque
>> and Galician, and Indian languages such as Gujarati, Devanagari,
>> Kannada and Malayalam. And another 44 languages including Icelandic,
>> Lao, Latvian, Welsh and Yiddish are on the way.
>> 
>> Localising software is a tedious job, but some people are passionate
>> enough about it to resort to unusual measures. The Hungarian
>> translation of OpenOffice was going too slowly for Janos Noll, founder
>> of the Hungarian Foundation for Free Software. So he built some
>> web-based tools to distribute the workload and threw a pizza party in
>> the computer room at the Technical University of Budapest. Over a dozen
>> people worked locally, with about 100 Hungarians submitting work
>> remotely over the web. Most of the work--translating over 21,000 text
>> strings--was completed in three days.
>> 
>> Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za[1], an open-source translation
>> project based in South Africa, says localising open-source programs
>> into Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Sesotho and other African languages makes
>> computers more accessible. With translated software, "these languages
>> are suddenly players in the modern world." Neville Alexander, a former
>> South African freedom-fighter, agrees. "An English-only or even an
>> English-mainly policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the
>> country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity, since people
>> are unable to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they
>> cannot use their first language," he says.
>> 
>> A similar approach is being taken in India, where there are 18 official
>> languages and over 1,000 regional dialects. Shikha Pillai is one of the
>> leaders of a team in Bangalore that is translating open-source
>> software, including OpenOffice, into ten Indian dialects. She, too,
>> feels that introducing Indian languages will help to foster a far
>> deeper penetration of information technology. "Localisation makes IT
>> accessible to common people," she says. "And Indian-language enabled
>> software could revolutionise the way our communications work; even the
>> way computers are used in India."
>> 
>> In May, Thailand's government launched a subsidised "people's PC" that
>> runs LinuxTLE, a Thai-language version of Linux. In September, Japan
>> said it would join a project established by China and South Korea to
>> develop localised, open-source alternatives to Microsoft's software.
>> Computer users around the world are discovering that open-source
>> software speaks their language. 
>> 
>> -----
>> [1] http://translate.org.za
>>  
>> 
>> See this article with graphics and related items at
>http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2246308&subjectID=348909&emailauth=%2527%2528P63H%253EW%255CQPT%253C%250A
>> 
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>-- 
>Sam Hiser
>
>Marketing Project Lead
>www.OpenOffice.org
>
>Executive Editor
>www.ConsultingTimes.com
>
>[email protected]
>(917) 375-8644
>