[Indic-computing-users] Some more perspective (Bangla)

[FN <fr...@by...>]

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Message: 2
   Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 14:23:47 -0500
   From: ta...@ey...
Subject: Re: GNU/Linux in Bangladesh

Quoting Sajed Chowdhury <sr...@ac...>:

>  Also, I think mine and
> Taneem's views might be just two isolated ones.  There are many others
> that you can contact who are not on this list but are active in using,
> developing and promoting Linux in Bangladesh.  For instance, check out:
> 
> http://www.banglalinux.org/
> 
> I'm not affiliated with the project, I just found it listed on dmoz.org
> I've met Rahat Ayub, who's the project leader.  They seem to have some
> big names behind their project, like Md. Zafar Iqbal and Dr. Kaykobad.
> We all can hope that they'll be successful.

Sajed bhai,

I was really thrilled to find out about this group few months ago. They have a 
formal organizational structure (which is a refreshing change from almost all 
other open source projects, I personally found the idea of a "PR wing" position 
very interesting). Their goals are very impressive, and I was looking forward 
to see their work. But with time I am becoming more and more skeptical about 
them. Here are some of my concerns:

* I have yet to see a single piece of code or anything else from them that I 
can download and use. I check their site on a regular basis (last time was last 
week) in the hope that they have something. But nothing so far.

* If I understand properly their document 
(http://www.banglalinux.org/docs/Bangla%20Support-for-Linux-Aug11-02.zip) 
claims they have changed the Linux OS, unfortunately these changes are not 
available to public.

* The only activity I have seen from them is that they have adopted a new 
keyboard layout called "binoy" (modified version of Bijoy), and you can try it 
out over the web if you are using IE (??); but they don't provide any source or 
doc or whatever to support this keyboard layout in Linux.

* While based on their (assuming they are part of BIOS) research they have 
decided having a Bangla Office suit based on OpenOffice, OpenOffice build 643C 
already supports Bangla OpenType fonts, so we can already use it.

I am also skeptical about some of the technical decisions they have taken (what 
I read in their doc). If they don't change their approach, I have a feeling in 
the long run they will find out they have wasted a lot of their precious time.

Anyway, do you remember the small discussion we had about companies/business 
people getting involved into open source with out understanding what it means? 
Well so far this group is turning out to be another example of that. Everything 
they are doing is under the hood, nothing is out there for public discussion or 
evaluation. Where is the spirit of Open Source?

One other thing which really puzzled me about them is, why on earth all their 
documents are in MS Word Document format??? How can they promote Linux when 
they don't use it themselves? Also one of their document 
(http://www.banglalinux.org/docs/bangla-linux.zip) is in mpp file format, does 
anyone know what file format that is?

Anyways, I am still hoping for the best out of them. Frankly I am very happy 
with the work we have done so far at www.bengalinux.org, but I was hoping a 
group like banglalinux.org can take over our work. But seems like right now we 
are heading in two different direction.

Thanks,
Taneem

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