Bill Stoddard wrote:
Incubator PMC,
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/BlueSky
This sounds like a really interesting project. I mean that in two ways:
first, the project looks very worthwhile in itself, helping rural
communities a couple of extra steps up the education ladder by way of
high tech.
Secondly, possibly even more important in the long term, having a
Chinese initiated project at Apache would be a huge "political" win,
setting precedents: Despite the vast amount of (talented) Chinese
people, I feel that there are rather few widespread Chinese-initiated or
-led open source software projects - at least I don't know of many (And
if I'm making a fool of myself right there, then please give me a
clue-by-four right now!). It would be a boon to the universe if this
situation could be remedied as fast as possible. I actually have no
doubt that this will happen sooner or later, but if Apache can make it
happen sooner, possibly by helping just this project along the road to
worldwide open source adoption, that would be a really great side-goal
of this incubation.
And yes - this would obviously have to happen in English. Acknowledging
that Chinese is a HUGE language in terms of the number of people
speaking it, it is still no world language in terms of the number of
nationalities speaking it. This can present a problem for many Chinese,
given that English education hasn't been, _as far as I understand_, a
top priority in China until somewhat recently.
Thus, to make this happen, there will probably have to be made some
extra efforts on both sides. But this can, as mentioned, make a
precedent - BlueSky will be an example of Chinese initiated, world wide
developed and adopted, open source software - and I believe that the
potential long term rewards, not only for this project, can be big.
Endre, lurker.
PS: Due to the scope of the project, localization to the native
languages in the region of deployment, or the use of pictograms and
similar, will of course be of huge importance. This focus is also shared
with projects like Ubuntu and OLPC, as far as I understand - there might
be interest in collaboration.
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