It’s My life
There was a discussion on ilugd about how Sun can continue to provide VirtualBox non-OSE edition despite there is a GPLed version.
Dual licensing and Free Software business models in general are one of my favorite topics. So I sat down and made a diagram explaining the source code flow of a dual licensed software.
I have got my first chance to be at a Chicagolug meet today. It was the Institute of Design in Downtown Chicago, about 25 miles from my hotel. I took the CTA Blue Line train and reached there in time. I called my friend Varun also to join. (We met accidentally on the streets of Downtown Chicago last week, just like at the hotel in Mountain View on the first time).
We had very interesting sessions on GNOME Do by Kevin Harriss and the semantic web by Andrew Dougherty. GNOME Do helps you do tasks like sending email, firing up a chat window, controlling the music player — all without using your mouse and in an easy way. It is much more than an application launcher. Only minus I could think of is its dependency on mono. It is similar to Quick Silver for the Mac. Then we had a very live and interesting discussion on the semantic web.
“The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” – From Wikipedia
We have also discussed its implications — some scary, on people’s lives like the increased ability of those with power to do surveillance on people.
After that I talked about the world day against software patents on September 24 and we discussed various activities we could organize to educate more people about the dangers of software patents. Stay tuned to the chicagolug mailing list for the details.
mukt.in 2008 was a great experience and I wanted to write about, but couldn’t till now.
The most interesting thing about mukt.in was the level of interaction it offered. I had some very interesting discussions with many in the community and students. Pavithran had gathered many familiar names in the Indian Free Software community for the event. Hiran and Shyam decided to come in the last minute. Hiran was taking a session on font designing and Shyam on speech recognition.
Morning itself I met Warren of Drupal and started discussing with him about debian and ubuntu. We discussed issues relating to both the projects and was thinking of having some publicity efforts around lenny release in September. I started a thread in DebianIndia about this. Now that I won’t be in India for sometime, I hope someone would follow it up (Kartik?).
Pavithran and Shreekrishna were running around making things happen. We had some discussion around localization and challenges. Some things we discussed were having consistent translations across all applications and when to transliterate (use the same words in English).
Then Shaktimaan took out his Neo FreeRunner by OpenMoko project and everyone started playing with it. I got the chance to make first call on that mobile.
We had a plus meet at Paradise hotel with Riyaz Usman joining us for dinner. We ran in the rain, took a bus, walked on the railway platform and took and auto to reach Paradise. It was Pavithran’s brilliant idea to take a platform ticket and walk on the platform since all the roads were filled with water and would have to swim otherwise.
Second day we had a very interesting BoF on Education. Thyagarajan from ilugc was telling beautiful stories about his experiences and we all shared our experiences and views on what education should provide.
Then before we concluded the event there was lightning talks of five minutes by each speaker. It was with great happiness and satisfaction I started my journey back home. But there was a twist to that journey, that I will write later 
The amazing collaboration and enthusiasm showed by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing‘s (SMC) KDE subproject made this possible. We had to cross the kde essentials barrier, which is required for inclusion in a KDE release as a supported language in a very short span of time. We achieved this milestone by completing 10000+ strings in about 10 days by 30+ contributors. KDE essentials include the most important packages that a default installation will have including the libraries and the base applications. Other Indian languages to be supported in this release are Hindi, Tamil and Panjabi. Exciting thing about this milestone is the participation of people from all walks of life including students, farmers, scientist, engineers …
Some statistics here shows the progress of Malayalam translations in a week (during the most active week). Click to enlarge.
Many of us were working till 3-4 am in the morning for the entire week leading upto the 4.1 deadline on July 11. #smc-project on Freenode IRC was the main connection for realtime collaboration with ‘mandoos’ (an IRC bot who can learn maanings and teach anyone who asks for it) helping the newly joined members of the team. You can join the IRC channel using your web browser by following this link.
People from all over the globe and round the clock joined this effort. Some places to mention are Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, USA … The enthusiam showed by the members throughout this great effort was amazing. In one single day 5 new contributors submited their first translation and more than 30 people contributed to this effort (Most of the contributors are listed here). It could be one of the few languages which completed kde essentials translations in such a short time.
You can see the list languages sorted by their percentatge of translations here. Malayalam is currently at 63rd position, 4th among Indian languages.
Here are some interesting screenshots of KDE 4.1 in Malayalam.
More screenshots from here.
I would like to thank the entire team for making this possible and do join us in the release party on Aug 9th and 10th at Thiruvananthapuram. Location and event schedule to be announced later (tune in to our mailing list for more details)
Update 1:
List of contributors. Thanks to Ani Peter for making this list.
1. Sasi Kumar
2. AnilKV
3. Ashik
4. Anoop
5. Anoopan
6. Prasad. S R
7. Hari Vishnu
8. Manu
9. Santhosh
10. Praveen
11. Manilal
12. Sushma
13. Sujith
14. Smitha
15. Remya
16. Hiran Venugopalan
17. Hitha Venugopalan
18. Chandrettan
19. Sankaranarayanan
20. Pratheesh
21. Syam Krishnan
22. Shiju Alex
23. Ragsagar V
24. Maxin B John
25. Sarath Lakshman
26. Baiju. M
27. Joju Joshua
28. Afsal
29. Nishan
30. Rajiv and his Mandoos
31. Ani
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