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On Sunday, 21st December 2014, we had the Fedora 21 Release Party at Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (TIFR). I thought I would put together few major points from the event as a report and follow-up. But it seems few participants have already done a good job of writing excellent reports on the event. So just wish to pass on links to their blogs for detailed reports. If you are wondering what's there to report on a small party like this, then please do read them, they may seem interesting and educating. 1. Trupti Kini's take on the event 2. Praveen Kumar's report as a speaker Thanks to both Trupti and Praveen! Special thanks to HBCSE and the team in Gnowledge lab, and especially Dr. Nagarjun who has been our inspiration for working on free software, for helping us out in managing the event, letting us use the space, and most importantly guiding us for future directions. [P.S. Will write separately about the contemplation over and ideas that emerged dur...

A lot of Android devices, platforms and apps have several issues regarding rendering of non-English text especially that of Indic text. Though many of them claim to support various Indic and other languages, it usually either means that they have a font for that language included or they have some of the native apps supporting all these languages. But this does not mean all the app will be able to render the non-English text properly. This usually happens for one of the following problem being present: 1. No fonts added in the device (or the native android system) 2. Fonts are not accessible by the third party application 3. App has its own Unicode font, but the native android system does not support text layout rendering for the language 4. App has the font and the android system also supports the language, but the sdk for the particular platform does not have widgets integrated with the complex text rendering features. This problem gave birth to the idea of developing...

This is going to be a long post and I am going to think aloud while typing it out. So before you lose interest, first of all, let me thank both Red Hat and CDAC for jointly hosting the FUEL-GILT Conference 2013 . The 2 days conference at Pune not just helped the default objective of advancing on the Fuel project but also revived the Indic computing community. It is after a long time that the stalwarts of Indian Language technology all got together on the same platform and worked on ideas and tasks that have been waiting for a long time. The significant highlight of the event has to be the growing harmony and collaboration between the technologists, linguists, Government bodies and Open Source community. So what is FUEL? Going by the words on the brochure and what I understand over the years, FUEL started with a simple idea of standardizing the most commonly used entries in the menus and submenus of a desktop and hence the name FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization). Toda...

[Continuing from previous post ].. Open source and free software community has been growing and preaching its philosophy for over decades. This preaching has also been supported by solid product lines that are freely available, better in performance and are more addictive than any other proprietary software around. Yet the ground realities of the software world are still largely favorable for proprietary model. Comparing market shares, or user base would be futile since open source hardly follows any market mechanism. It is very difficult to keep track of number of open source users. Hence the only method to understand the popularity and usage patterns is to call hundreds of common software users and ask them what software do they have on their home computers. I have been a part of a marketing campaign and fortunate enough to be present in the actual execution at various places, which gave an opportunity of understanding thousands of common computer users. With no exception, all of the...