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Developing open source

David Becker CNET News.com

Published: 16 Feb 2004 14:05 GMT

Robert Ludvik, head of a project to create a Slovenian version of OpenOffice, said it took a team of 10 about a year to do the translation work. But the effort was supported by government and education officials as part of a national plan to promote adoption of open-source software. Microsoft makes Slovenian versions of Windows and Office, but open-source products are cheaper and create more opportunities for local developers.

Such concerns appear to be drawing Microsoft's attention. The government of Thailand was showing a similar preference for open-source products when the software giant unrolled a plan to provide a scaled-back combination of Windows and Office available at a steep discount from normal prices.

Maggie Wilderotter, senior vice president of business strategy for Microsoft, said the Thailand deal reflects a new flexibility at Microsoft in dealing with developing markets.

"What we used Thailand as a pilot to look at is, 'can we separate product sets to meet the needs of citizens in a developing environment?'" Wilderotter said. "'How can we put good-better-best product sets into the market based on local needs?' We got very good feedback to see how we would change our product offers in those situations, and we came up with a package that met those needs."

"Developing countries have much different needs and approaches than developed ones," Wilderotter added. "For a lot of these developing nations, there's huge opportunity for our company in the long run, and figuring out how to engage customers there is a very important to us."

Microsoft also recently announced that it will make Office 2003 and Windows available in all 14 major Indian languages over the next few years. Even though many of the language groups normally would be too rare to justify commercial software work, Microsoft is sharing the load with university and government programmers in India working under the Project Bhasha programme.

Indian leaders have joined numerous other government entities recently in giving preferential treatment to open-source software, and OpenOffice already has been adapted for five Indian languages.

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So if you upgrade to XP SP3 you can't uninstall Internet Explorer, I'm quite sure I'm having a Deja-vu feeling about MS preventing people from uninstalling Internet Explorer in other Windows products.