[Fsf-friends] A CPIM Hijack of Free Software Foundation?

[Anivar Aravind]

Just an update

The website of this chennai programme changed the name of Newly
launching organisation as  "Free Software Forum, Tamil Nadu"

Anyway it is good that they changed the name. But Still a lot of
questions remains
The event is suppose to start at 4 pm today ,  The event website still
list the objective of the event as follows
<quote>
"The objective of the event will be the launch of the project for the
development of a Tamil Version of the GNU/ Linux operating system. The
launch will be made by the Mayor, M.Subramanian. The project will be
developed by engineering students with able technical support from the
IT professionals & professors, and infrastructural support by the
entrepreneurs."
<quote>

Let me bring some statistics

Gnome L10n page for Tamil lists Upcoming gnome 2.24 release is 88%
translated which is enough for becoming Officially Supported Language
in Gnome.
http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/ta/gnome-2-24

KDE l10n page says lists 41% translated string in KDE 4.2 Trunk and
49% translated strings in KDE 4.1 . In KD4.1 Tamil was an officially
supported Languages ( Only 5 languages in India qualified for this)

All Available distribution including gNewSense  fully supports Tamil.
Even Controversial BOSS GNU/Linux
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/2008/09/03/what-a-waste-of-talent-and-money/>
Supports Tamil well

Many among localisation groups are well aware of Free Software
Philosophy and bringing out Tamil Translations of RMS's essays.
Yesterday they launched the the book titled "kattatra Menporul" as a
part of Software Freedom Day Celebrations  in Jaya Engineering
College,  Thirunindravur,  Chennai.

Some developers associated with swathanthra malayalam computing is
helping Tamil Free Software Community to develop Tamil Text to speech
system based on dhvani

So My question is what is so special about this custom distribution? .
It becomes a trend in india top distribute Custom CD's with some re
branding for wastage of public money. Making custom CD's for getting
some some govt projects will  duplicate a lot of development efforts
and resources when new version comes. The projects like  Kairai
GNU/Linux (Funded by CDIT, Kerala) , Bharatheya Open Office, Indic
Firefox, Indix (all 3 By CDAC)  etc   went obsolete because they are
not integrated with upstream and no body is going to use the old
version because new versions are available upstream.

Bacause of above reason I request newly forming Free Software forum
Tamilnadu to drop the Objective new distro and guide associated
students and developers to work with existing Localisation groups and
Developers to make it it more effective

Anivar Aravind
Swathanthra Malayalam computing
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc