I am a bit sad about the responses Glen on his request about
Unicode in Linux.
I think it is very important to promote Unicode in the Linux
community, especially because Linux has the potential to give many developing
countries access to state of the art software without having to
pay huge amounts for licenses, and being able to run it on
less advanced machines than needed for the current commercial
OSes. Recently, the Mexican govt. decided to introduce Linux
machines in its schools, saving itself many millions of dollars
in licenses, I know in the Philippines Linux is used to teach
Unix, in India, Linux is widely available, and used by several
companies. Especially India would gain enormously by having Unicode
support in Linux, to be able to process its many scripts.
(Which will require support for things like bidi (for Urdu,
Kashmiri, Sindhi, etc.) contextual analysis and complex ligaturing
for most of the scripts. I would be willing to contribute my expertise
to provide algorithms and support for developing these things if
people want to include them in Linux. The next generation of
software engineers in India will probably grow up on Linux.
Maybe it should help to point out that Unicode itself was produced
much in a joint effort of many companies and people on the net, and
is not the brain child of Microsoft or any other large company
alone.
Jeroen Hellingman
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:43 EDT