salimma's Journal: Geeking in third-world Indonesia

I am trying to be a part-time open-source advocate during my holiday with my family in Indonesia, and it is harder than it would seem to an outsider. One gets the combination of having to retrain people with the pervasiveness of piracy. The situation is even worse than in developed countries, where a lot of people could afford products such as Microsoft Office but nevertheless have better things to spend money on; here the price argument would probably backfire.

The latest version of Microsoft Office XP, after all, can be had for about $5, $1.70 per disc. This is despite Microsoft recently starting to crack down on white-box manufacturers - so now you could not buy an assembled PC preloaded chock-full with illegal software, but you could pop down to the store next door and get all the CDs you need, and get someone (your teenage son, a geek friend, etc) to set it up for you. One even gets a discount for bulk purchases!

Some of the cleanest PCs, legally speaking, in the whole town, if not the whole country, must be the two we donated to an orphanage two weeks ago. I contemplated installing Linux on them, but that would probably do it a disservice; on Pentium-class hardware with less than 64 MB of RAM, one would have to go back to Red Hat 6, Mandrake 7, or such. Not exactly an ideal introduction, especially when the town is washed with pirated software (for Windows). So on these PCs, apart from Windows, everything else is legit. Open Office, Mozilla, AdAware, and lots of freeware games. My dad's new notebook should be cleaner, really, but for Office XP and Adobe Acrobat (so shoot me - Windows does not have a free print-to-PDF yet. Score one for Linux, if only dad would stop getting confused by even Mozilla :p)

I was feeling dissatisfied with OpenOffice's non-native interface, even on Windows, and even using the latest development version (1.1 beta). The feeling is partly gone, however, after I finally fired up MS Word XP (yes, I must be one of the last person in the tech world to see it. Vim and OpenOffice serve me fine). For those who do not have it and would not buy/pirate it, it looks and feels like a .NET application using WinForms - install the .NET SDK from Windows Update and SharpDevelop if you don't know what I mean. In short, non-native, though it would look quite nice on Windows 2000. Just not on Luna - must be an indication of where the money lies.

IANAL, so could anyone in the audience inform me whether selling GPLed CDs of Red Hat and Mandrake, with CD covers and labels pirated from the respective retail versions, constitutes a copyright-infringing action on the part of the pirate, distributor, buyer, or any combination of the aforementioned? It quite tickles the mind seeing a pirated version of an essentially free product, after all.

At least the cable modem at home is now pumping 20KBytes/second, making it half as fast as my late ADSL connection. It still crawls on Saturday mornings but not as bad as last year, when getting any sort of connection at all on weekends was like playing Russian roulette. And I still remembered testing a 3-CD Red Hat beta using rsync over a dial-up connection... *shudder*

Yes.

[The Cydonian]

There was a Linux distributor in Singapore who got the rap for selling Red Hat CD's with the brand logo on. Could be wrong on the details, but as I understood it, you can sell Red Hat ISO's burned on a CD, but you can't call them "Red Hat", as such. (Nor use their uber-geek logo)

Which is what this guy in Singapore is now doing. Guy still sells the CD's, but calls them the You-Know-Who distro.

As for popularising OSS/Software Libre in piracy-rich places and Oo, you see a problem, I see an oppurtunity. MS Off

Re:Yes.

[Surak]

There was a Linux distributor in Singapore who got the rap for selling Red Hat CD's with the brand logo on. Could be wrong on the details, but as I understood it, you can sell Red Hat ISO's burned on a CD, but you can't call them "Red Hat", as such. (Nor use their uber-geek logo)

You can't use the logo, but IIRC, it used to be that you *could* call it Red Hat, but you *couldn't* call it *Official* Red Hat Linux, and Cheapbytes used to sell something called 'Cheapbytes Red Hat Linux'/

Now, I think this chan

Re:Yes.

[salimma]

Oh true - Cheapbytes now call them Pink Tie, I notice. I do recall Red Hat was not so stringent about it last time - until Red Hat 8.0 and Bluecurve, really. Of course, Cheapbytes never put any logo on their CDs anyway.

MS Office still does not have a BI version, true, but I think you can get third-party dictionaries and such - pirated as well, of course. I don't know anyone who uses spell-checking anyway :p

In any case, when I was at school in Indonesia my grades for BI were never really high. How about yo

Re:Yes.

[The Cydonian]

Selamat datang, jangan berdiri dekat pintu. Yup, that's the limit of my BI/Malay, wholly learnt from observing notices on the sg subway :-) [For non-SE-Asia readers, I understand it's got something to do with keeping away from doors when they are closing].

I hang out in sg occassionally, but no, I'm not a sg'ean. That is, I'm mostly untainted by the sg school system, hence I know enough Sanskrit to guess that the BI "bahasa" means language! ;-) ("Bhaasha" in Sanskrit).

I'm fairly interested (although not de

Re:Yes.

[salimma]

For non-SE-Asia readers, I understand it's got something to do with keeping away from doors when they are closing

> would be a more literal translation. For what it's worth, I'm willing to bet Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais and Burmese would be equally lost trying to read it despite being SE Asians :)

Madagaskar was settled by fellow Malayo-Austronesian speakers, but their modern language has almost nothing in common with Indonesian dialects, Malay and Tagalog - quite interesting what millenias of separ

Re:Yes.

[salimma]

Argh, failure to preview bites. The missing translation was 'Welcome, stay away from the doors'.

Do you manage to catch those MRT announcements in Tamil? The recording used to be so bad circa 1996-97 I could barely understand the English and Malay messages.

Re:Yes.

[The Cydonian]

A more interesting comparison, in a Malay-centric sense, would be with a certain Malay tribe that was (forcibly?) settled in Sri Lanka during the British colonial period. How would their tongue compare with modern Malay? (Sorry, forgot the tribe's name, hence can't google it out; but it does exist, read about it a couple of years back)

Point taken on i18n of course; there was an earlier article here on how kids in a certain Delhi slum learnt websurfing within a week, despite not making sense of the English

Re:Yes.

[salimma]

A more interesting comparison, in a Malay-centric sense, would be with a certain Malay tribe that was (forcibly?) settled in Sri Lanka during the British colonial period. How would their tongue compare with modern Malay? (Sorry, forgot the tribe's name, hence can't google it out; but it does exist, read about it a couple of years back)

Interesting; I have not heard about that myself, but when Sri Lanka was a Dutch colony (before the treaty of 1824) the Dutch used to deport political prisoners there.

A lo

Nasty follow-up to the trademark question

[salimma]

... it appears that Red Hat now wants resellers to remove any logos and trademarks from binaries and text files [computerworld.co.nz] as well.

From Computerworld New Zealand [computerworld.co.nz]:

In a posting to the New Zealand Linux users' group mailing list, Charles says the trademark enforcement goes beyond the distribution name. Red Hat insists that resellers remove all of the company's logos and trade marks from text and binary files included with the distribution, a difficult and time-consuming process for resellers. Red Hat Linux is commonly