Re: Experience the New Windows - native languages

["Ruchir Tewari" <ruchir_tewari@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with you about 500% .
As mentioned on the GII list today, the internet
user base in India is about 2-3 million, whereas in China
it is already about 22.5 million. Localization has really paid off
in China. If linux+internet (which go hand in hand) are to achieve a 
penetration beyond a handful of millions, localization is the key. Without 
that it remains a chicken and egg problem.

Consider Hotmail - you can use it to send mail in chinese,
but not in any indian language, even though it was started by an indian.
Now that chinese support is strong enough, I've seen chinese people send 
mail and browse web pages in chinese all the time. I'm sure majority of 
indians will communicate in their native language vs. in english over the 
internet if they get the chance.
Btw, what's the status of indlinux.org ?

Other thing of course is bandwidth -
as an aside, China has an operational 40Gbps IP backbone operational
with just 15,000 miles of fibre, connecting 17 cities. India,
which claims to have more than 100,000Km of fiber laid out
(check dotindia.com) is still crawling at 155Mbps between Delhi
and Bombay and even lower bandwidths between other cities.
Serious noise has to be made about this gross underutilization of
resources. More bandwidth will mean lower cost of internet access
for everyone.



> > I am sure that there are people who would benefit from an "Indian 
> Linux",
> > but we are not talking about those kind of people in this discussion. 
> The
>
> It's not an "all or nothing" thing Atul, I prefer an English interface 
> myself -
> but I'd love to have a few apps around which _do_ support this.  Mandrake
> supports quite a few languages (including hindi / devanagri) in its 
> extensive
> i18n (internationalization) libraries.  An "Indian distro" would get rid of 
> the
> swedish / finnish / german / chinese stuff and add support for a few more
> indian languages.

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