Re: [ossig] Red Hat Drops Free Linux

["Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan" <sharuzzaman@eudoramail.com>]

I have previously argued about creating a national distro in MyPenguin mailing list. For me, I totally opposed the idea, as Bahasa Melayu is using Romanised character. In order to create a successful new distro, you must have an idea (and novel technology) that you think may attract people to help you.

See that Red Hat has RPM, Debian has apt, Gentoo has emerge. What our national distro should have? Bahasa Melayu? Language is not a "killer" technology to justify a creation of a national distro.

Creating a distro also requires you to have all the infrastructure and manpower in order to distribute and maintain the distro. Do we have big Internet bandwith to cater the sudden surge of people downloading the distro? Do we have the people to keep the package up-to-date? Do we have the money to pay all the engineers?

Even for language that is not using Roman character, I think GNU gettext/pango has provide a good infrastructure for translating all the software into any Unicode character. See how other people translating software like XMMS, GNOME and KDE without even need to have a specialised distro.

------------------------
Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan

--------- Original Message ---------
DATE: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:07:37
From: Gan Sze Kai <gansk@sunway.edu.my>
To: ossig@mncc.com.my
Cc: 

All just a suggestion, hope to have a better knowledge exchange and technical support for Open Source. :) cheers.

Gan Sze Kai wrote:

Opps... Seem like Localize the OS is not easy. But was it develop our skill? Maybe I should consider the bussiness point of view. :P
How about maybe we can gather all the Malaysian product in one collection CD which can support different platform like Redhat and Debian ...etc. or make something like sourceforce.net to control, support and development those localize software?


Ken Wong wrote:

On Wednesday 05 November 2003 12:17, Seah Hong Yee wrote:
  
Malaysia uses a language that would involve better intergration of
unicode onto Linux or something that is not being done on regular
main stream distro, then another fork would make sense.  
    

Actually, it still wouldn't. There's no reason why you can't integrate 
any improvements you want into the existing code base. As it is, the 
Linux kernel is already Unicode ready and aware. Any changes needed are 
mostly in X or X-based apps. There's no reason why you can't try to get 
it integrated with the existing projects/distributions out there.

That was the point of the article I linked and it's a situation many of 
these "localized" distributions are faced with today. Thailand's 
SELinux has to be maintained separately from the original RH base it 
came from. Likewise, Red Flag is unable to keep up with the latest 
packages. Many of the "localized" distributions are outdated and 
unpatched against the most recently discovered security 
vulnerabilities. Look forward to a Windows/MSBlast like situation if 
any of these distributions gain decent sized marketshare.

Ken



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