பேச்சு:தமிழ் தளையறு மென்கலன்கள்

கட்டற்ற கலைக்களஞ்சியமான விக்கிபீடியாவில் இருந்து.

This is part of an essay I wrote about Tamil Computing. I want to translate this article. But, I am putting these notes/article, because the links may be useful for others. --Natkeeran 19:09, 11 ஆகஸ்ட் 2005 (UTC)

Of course, others are welcome to translate this article.


தலைப்புக்குப் பொருத்தமற்ற ஒரே வரியைத் தவிர வேறெதுவும் இல்லாத இப்பக்கத்தை நீக்கப் பரிந்துரைக்கிறேன். இந்தக் கட்டுரையும் தரப்பட்டுள்ள இணைப்புக்களும் முக்கியமானவை. ஆனால் தமிழில்லாத கட்டுரையை ஒரு கட்டுரையாகக் கருதமுடியாது. --கோபி 15:50, 21 நவம்பர் 2006 (UTC)

"Free software gives everyone the permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions-but not permission to add restrictions of their own."[pg59] The Free Software Foundation’s project to build a free operating system was the GNU or “GNU’s Not Unix” project.

Some of the people from the Free Software Foundation wanted to disassociate themselves from the perceptive association of “free software” with anti- businesses, anti-intellectual property rights and communism, thus founded the Open Source Initiative to appeal to the business. Richard Stallman has criticized Open Source strategy as following: “the rhetoric of “Open Source” focuses on the potential to make high quality, power software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community, and principle.”[pg70] Free Software Foundation was never anti-business as evidenced by various business such as Cygnus, RedHat, and MySQL that it spurned. Also, Free Software Foundation seeks to uphold the users “natural right to copy”, share, and modify software.

The free and open source software are fundamental for developing multilingual or Tamil computing software. Not just the software and the method of software creation, but also overall philosophy. Rather than waiting for large corporations to respond to various linguistic communities’ needs, that they may be structurally incapable of delivering, free and open source allows for the community to respond to their own needs.

The Tamil Nadu Chapter of the Free Software Foundation was inaugurated by Richard Stallman at the Swatantra conference. The Free/Open concept has been chosen as the vehicle for Tamil Computing development. In Tamil, the Tamizha Group lead by Mugunth, and Tamil Linux Group led by V. Venkataramanan, and Zh Group have all been localizing and developing Tamil computing software with free software spirit, but without the strict definitions around licensing and methods. Now there is an effort to formally define or adopt Free Software General Public License, and more vigorously commit to such software projects.

The GNU project has lead to the development of various software, software development tools, applications, compilers, debuggers, editors, and GNU/Linux, and GNOME. Various efforts have been made to translate various software into Tamil. Among the pioneering efforts was to translate KDE (K Desktop Environment) into Tamil. Work was also undertaken to enable various Linux distributions to support Tamil. Although, initial work was undertaken to localize GNOME, there seems to be no activity in that area at the current movement.

Chennai-based Panacea Dreamweavers has done a lot of pioneering work in developing open source tools for Windows environment. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panacea_dreamweavers)

The main Tamil Free and Open Source software resources are summarized below. (Assembler, Linker, Compiler, Editor, Kernal, GNU C Libraries, TeX, X Windows)

Main Free and Open Source Tamil Communities

Microsoft Windows-based Open Source/Freeware Tools http://www.pdsoftware.in Developers: Panacea Dreamweavers Software Private Limited, Chennai -600 018.

Tamil Linux/Unix Enthusiasts and Developers http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamilinix/

Thamizh Developers http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThamiZhaDeveloper/ http://thamizha.com/modules/news/

Venkat http://www.thamizhlinux.org/main/ http://www.domesticatedonion.net/blog/?itemid=195


Tamil Free Software http://vaigai.org/

zhakaNini or Tamil PC http://www.zhakanini.org/index.php

Linux User Groups in Tamil Nadu http://www.linux.org/groups/india/tamil_nadu.html http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-cbe/ http://www.asiaosc.org/enwiki/page/Tamil.html http://www.chennailug.org/index.php

Localization and Internalization Groups http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/ http://ta.openoffice.org/index.html http://translation.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/registry.cgi?team=ta http://pootle.wordforge.org/ta/

Open Source Tamil and Indian Companies http://www.chennaikavigal.com/aboutus.htm http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-india/2002-March/002267.html


K Desktop Environment (100% Tamil Support) V. Venkatarmanan & Vaseeharan Group http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Tamil-Linux-HOWTO/x36.html http://www.thamizhlinux.org/main/

GNOME Desktop Environment (Ramanan Selvaratnam, Dinesh Nadarajah) http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnome-tamil/ http://tamilgnome.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=howto-translate



Tamil Status and Linux Versions

Linux Version: GNU/Linux Tamil Support: http://www.thamizhlinux.org/main/ Developers: V. Venkatarmanan Resources: http://barathee.beigetower.org/html/index.php

Linux Version: Mandrakelinux Tamil Support: 48% (On Feb/26/2005) Developers: Badri Seshadri Resources: http://www.mandrakelinux.com/l10n/ta.php3

Linux Version: RedHat Tamil Support: 98% Developers: zh Group Resources: http://www.zhakanini.org/redhat.php

Linux Version: Debian Tamil Support: N/A Developers: Ganesan Rajagopal? Resources: http://packages.debian.org/testing/gnome/tamil-gtk2im


Windows Version: