This presentation intends to illustrate the successful use of Unicode in a selection of medium sized Open Sourced projects, highlighting good development methodoligies along with development mistakes. By examining projects whose central goals are not that of internationalization I hope to show how Unicode is used in common situations by normal programmers. I hope to use examples from web based applications and traditional GUI applications.

Due to their distributed nature many Open Source projects encompass a wide set of nationalities in their developer make up. This leads to a good awareness of the need to handle different languages amongst the developers and a willingness to take the time to internationalization their applications.

However due to the nascent nature of many Open Source projects their developers frequently do not have a strong internationalization background or experience. This leads to a certain evolutionary approach which is repeated over many projects. The end point of this evolution is usually a strongly internationalized application with a good Unicode foundation but the path their can be sometimes very rocky.

This presentation will firstly walk through examples of similar Open Source projects and compare methodologies and mistakes before finally trying to draw a common set of good practises for using Unicode effectively in Open Source development.

I am assuming a minimal familiarity with the concepts of Open Source development and methodologies.