DesertWind » Freedom Matters

Dear Linguistic Friend

Riyaz Usman — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:08:00 +0000

It makes you feel good when you hear good things about your good friends. And when you keep on hearing good news, nothing like it. Santhosh Thottingal, is one such good friend, who always makes his friends happy with continuous feed of good news. He pings almost every day with some news or the other. It can be about his workshop on Wikimania 2010 in Poland, or about one of his apprentice winning Google SoC scholarship, or one of his project making big news.

Recently, he has been selected to the Language committee of Wikimedia foundation in its recent expansion. Santhosh is the first and only Indian in the 16-member committee. Not a small achievement at all.

Wikimedia Foundation is the organization which operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation language committee is in charge of developing a clear policy and documentation for new language projects and their proposal, processing those requests, and supporting and coordinating new projects to optimize their success.

Santhosh is a major Wiki-contributor from India, and a volunteer in several Indian language projects. He is known for his contributions to Free and Open source projects particularly in Indic language computing. He is a lead developer of Swathanthra Malayalam computing, a developer collective working for Malayalam language computing. He is also the author of Dhvani Text to speech system for Indic languages which won FOSS India award 2008. He is upstream author for more than 10 packages related to language computing in various GNU/Linux distributions. He is the author of hyphenation algorithms for Indic languages in TeX and Openoffice.org. He designed and developed the biggest Indic language computing initiative named SILPA and authored many Indic language processing algorithms such as Indic soundex, cross language fuzzy string match etc. He wrote the wiki2cd tool used for creating the offline version of Malayalam Wikipedia. He was invited to conduct a workshop on offline Wikipedia projects in Wikimania 2010, the annual Wikipedia conference at Poland.

His admission to the Wikimedia Language committee has happened taking his years of contribution to the Indian language computing into consideration, along with his numerous contributions to Wiki projects. This sure is a proud moment for all of the FLOSS community in India.

Visit Santhosh’s blog to know more about him and his projects.

Electricity Billing and Super Computing

Riyaz Usman — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:29:11 +0000

My friend Hiran bought it to my notice, when this particular news was telecasted on Manorama news, the idiot box version of the largest (in circulation) Malayalam Newspaper. He was quite astounded by the foolishness of the news report, even though I thought it was too silly to even make some noise around it. There is no English version of the report available; This is the brief:

Kerala Govt is going to lose Rs. 214 Crore grant from Indian Govt, allowed for the IT development in Electricity Dept. This is due to the pro-Free software policies of the Kerala Govt. Apparently, as per the report the software (which includes billing process) is impossible to develop in a free software, since many of the required ‘components’ will not work on free software. The report also worries about the inexperience of the company quoted the lowest amount on the tender, can add to the ‘obvious failure possibilities of free software’. It seems that of all states in India, only Kerala is so rigid on using free software for Government projects, and it ridicules the Govt on its stance which might result in the loss of the grant.

While I’m unsure if there’s any propaganda behind this news attack against free software at large, there definitely seems to be some hidden agenda behind this. The news doesn’t quote any expert on the inability of free software to develop such a ‘complex’ solution, or neither it does quote the source which talks about the terms and conditions of the grant. Since it seems that the opinions expressed at the report are of the reporter, we’ll have assume that he is a expert in this area, who have never heard of GNU/Linux, LAMP, Wiki, et al.

I just wonder just what this particular project need more than 91% of the Top 500 super computers, 8 out of 10 reliable hosting solutions, and the one which powers IBM Sequoia, a 20 petaflop super computer.

Rufscript, new font released by Hiran

Riyaz Usman — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:17:56 +0000

Hiran Venugopalan, my friend and a FOSS freak (what a coincidence!), has releases a new GPL licensed font.

More Details from Hiran’s Blog.

mukt.in v2 @ Hyderabad, Aug 1 – 3, 2008

Riyaz Usman — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:32:56 +0000

mukt is derived from the word mukti, meaning the experience of being free from bondage.

Composed of a body of individuals who love Free/Open Source Software (FOSS), the mukt.in team organizes series of events to promote the same. mukt.in v2 is scheduld to held on Aug 1 – 3 in Hyderabad.
It aims to collaborate skill levels from complete novice to expert; collaborate to share knowledge and experiences.

mukt.in first started in 2007, Aug 24,25,26th. It featured discussions, speeches, presentations, and intense interactions.

For more info and regsitration: http://www.mukt.in/