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Re: He's dead, Jim!



On Sat, 15 Jul 2000, Ira Abramov wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Matan Ziv-Av wrote:

> > On ???, Ira Abramov wrote:
 
> > > Our goals were to raise awareness in the Israeli market to Linux and
> > > advocate development of Hebrew Apps, and it seems we are almost half the
> 
> > You are riding on hot air for a single reason -there is no way for
> > linux to succeed in israel without hebrew support.
> 
> so I can't advocate to companies to write linux apps in Hebrew until
> there are linux apps in Hebrew? are you reading what you are writing?

At the moment writing a hebrew app in linux is not very easy. See a later
comment about bidi in gtk/qt
> 
> > - A web browser that can show every hebrew page that IE can.
> 
> I understand Konqueror is on the way, not thanks to ANY ISRAELI or at
> least anyone from THIS list.

How many Israelies are getting paid to write free Linux softtware?

There is also mozilla, albeit it would take a bit longer to get a stable
product. BTW: Much of the hebrew support here is written by a team of
IBM-Israel.

BTW: Hebrew support for vim and hebrew support for lyx were both written
by Israely volunteers.

> 
> > - A mail user agent that can read hebrew as sent by popular windows
> > mailers (netscape, outlook).
> > - A hebrew word processor.

One thing that could change that is addition of bidi (bidirectional) 
support for gtk and qt. gtk 1.4 and qt 2.2 are supposed to have Hebrew
support (for gtk - using the fribidi library was written written by
another Israeli volunteer. Though most of the work of adding bidi support
to gtk is done elsewhere).

I don't know much about qt 2.2. I know that the code for bidi support in
gtk does exist (http://pango.org). A couple of days ago I tried installing
the rpms from there. I had some minor installation problems, but it seems
to work. 

when any of those will be stable enough - every gtk [qt] program will
automatically have a similar level of hebrew support as any program in
Hebrew win/Hebrew macos . I believe that this will give a reasonnable
level of Hebrew support (although not enough for a word processor). So
this is something that can break the chiken-and-egg cycle here. However -
this alone won't be enough without Hebrew documentation, translations, and
software.

> 
> well, if you don't build a strong community, you don't build awareness,
> and without awareness, no one will try the OS, and if no one tries it,
> no one gets to like it, and if no one likes it, no one uses it, and if
> they don't use it, they don't demand hebrew apps, and if they don't
> demand the apps, then Kivun (z"l?), Dvir, Kalanit, Hashavshevet and all
> those companies won't WRITE them.

There is another small point: Will there be people who'll buy hebrew
software?

For instance: If Dvir were to release a linux version of qtext or Kivun
will publish a Hebrew version of Dagesh (I believe that doing that using
wine-lib shouldn't be *very* difficult) - how much would you be willing to
pay for that?

This is not a rhetorical question.

Kepp in mind that there are not so many potential customers.

> 
> so you see, I tried to start that cycle. if you have better sugestions,
> then SHOOT. even if youdon't have time to realize the ideas, SOMEBODY
> ELSE MIGHT.
> 
> but do NOT belittle other people's work, at least not without showing
> something better/comparable that you might have done.

It is worth noting that Matan is one of those who do "do something" about
Hebrew support in Linux in their spare time.

> 
> > - Much of the documentation translated.
> 
> that is done very slowly. all the LDP is free, and free in the meaning
> you can translate it too. it's already in Spanish, French German and
> Japanese in parts, only Israelis sit on their asses and wait for the
> Hebrew version to drop from the sky. translating is great as a learning
> process, but I don't need to learn most of the simpler how-tos that need
> translating not am I fast typist in Hebrew that can do this in his
> (nonexistant) spare time.

Producing hebrew documents under windows/macos is quite easy. Producing
hebrew documents under linux is a harder, but can be done (at least 
PS/PDF).

Anybody tried using sgml tools with Hebrew?

Indeed - not enough is being done here.

> 
> so again we're down to volunteers.
> 

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir


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