[Fsf-friends] Software Freedom day event was a grand success

Anivar Aravind anivar.aravind@[EMAIL-PROTECTED]
Sun Sep 16 15:34:09 IST 2007


http://anivar.movingrepublic.org/2007/smc-sfd07-wide-news-coverage-in-malayalam-dailies/

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) got widespread support from
malayalam mainstream print media for the 2 day (14th & 15th september)
software freedom day celebration & the release of 7 software packages
developed during last year. It is the time to look at our history.

 SMC is reactivated from a dead state, as a result of personal
discussions with praveen, hiran & vimaljoseph in the sidelines of
GPLv3 Conference in bangalore. The new team is setup at last year SFD
celebrations in Thrissur. Suresh, Baiju(the founder of SMC), Hussain
KH (rachana), Anwar, Students in GEC etc also joined in the team at
that time. Now we have more than 30 developers+localizers. The
astounding progress within the short span of time is described below

    * December 2006: Debian Installer is Fully Translated into
Malayalam ( The Work of Debian malayalam, a sub team of Swathanthra
malayalam computing)
    * January 2007: Santhosh Thottingal of SMC done a complete
architectural rewrite of Dhvani, the Indian language text to speech
system by Ramesh hariharan & added Malayalam support to It.
    * March 2007 : participated & Conducted workshops in FOSS
Meet at NITC, Kozhikkode
    * March 2007: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing selected as a
participating Organisation ( and only Indian Organisation) in Google
Summer of Code Project. 5 projects were allotted.
    * April 2007: GNU aspell supported Malayalam (major issues are resolved)
    * May 2007: Swanalekha: a Phonetic Input scheme for malayalam using SCIM
    * June 2007: Lalitha, Bolnagiri based xkb keyboard for malayalam by Jinesh
    * July 2007: Added pango support to Tuxtype by Mobin M as part of
GSoC work. Now Tuxtype is usable for all Indian languages
    * July 2007:Debian package (Debconf )Translations. Malayalam is
the Most translated indian language with 27% translation of
configuration strings
    * August 2007: Malayalam Matrix screen saver Release, & First
Public Release of Aspell- malayalam spellchecker with More than 137000
words list (It is the largest Indian Language Aspell wordlist. Second
is hindi with 25000 words).
    * September 2007: Gnome Officially supports malayalam in Gnome
2.20 with More than 80% translations
    * September 2007: Sarika : The first Free Indian language speech
recognition engine is developed by Shyam K (as a part of GsoC). It
Currently identifies more than 50 malayalam words
    * September 2007: Tuxtype malayalam is Released by Mobin.M &
friends (Vimal, Shreyas, Sreeranj, Prince)
    * Meera , a Malayalam Traditional opentype font with more than 900
glyphs is released under GNU GPL by Hussain K.H and Suresh P . It is
developed for Suruma renderering scheme (not compatible with Uniscribe
scheme for windows) . Authors are working on a Uniscribe compatible
(windows) version now

 Pramode Sir wrote:

    A society and a culture is identified by its language - once the
language is dead, the society starts losing its identity. A good way
to keep a language alive is to take it to the digital world - the
world of the PC/Communication devices and the Internet. This is one
context in which developing regional language computing environments
and popularising them has great significance.

The theme for the 2 day event was "Swathantra Software and Malayalam
computing" . Free software is touching the lives of common man now !!

Digg It: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Wide_spread_coverage_for_Software_Freedom_Day_in_Mainstream_Print_Media

FSDaily: http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Wide_spread_coverage_for_Software_Freedom_Day_in_Mainstream_Print_Media/



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