06 July 2005

FOSS, and the preservation of Gaelic

You may have picked up that I am keen on minority languages and also Free and Open Source Software. So this was bound to get my attention. "'People should not be placed in a situation where they cannot use software in their own language. If open source projects mean that users can themselves contribute to preventing this situation and ... to reversing it, then I think the outlook for smaller (or what are often rather pejoratively called 'minority') languages is improved in an important way.'"
In this case it was the release of OpenOffice.org for Scots Gaelic that was of interest. It being a very minority language, it is under the threshold of commercial interest for M$. And as proprietary software is not meant to be hacked to make the necessary modifications, it shows how handy an open source approach can be: the code is there to be worked on, so community groups can do so.
NewsForge | OpenOffice.org, FOSS, and the preservation of Gaelic:

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"Spend and tax" not "tax and spend"

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