[Wikimediaindia-l] OT FOSS assist WAS Re: Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I didn't get the feeling that Vickram is saying that it's your fault.

It's not possible and not desirable to force everybody to switch to a
different browser. It is possible, however, to educate people about
having a choice. That's what FOSS activism is about and that's how i
understand Vickram's suggestion. Why is FOSS activism relevant in this
discussion, you ask? Not just because the Wikimedia movement is very
strongly related to FOSS, but because in this case FOSS technologies
provide a tangible benefit - the ability to use Indic fonts. And FOSS
relies on word-of-mouth promotion and activism rather than on
marketing professionals.

Moving from IE to Firefox is much easier than moving between operating
systems or compilers. Millions of people wouldn't imagine moving from
Windows to Linux, but can easily move to Firefox.

Both Firefox and IE can be installed side-by-side and the presence of
a different browser doesn't require any more maintenance. And if the
people don't like Firefox despite its better font support, they can
always move back to IE with zero effort.

(In general, everything i say about Firefox applies to Google
Chrome/Chromium, too - it's open source, modern and
standards-compliant. However, for the particular issue of fonts
Firefox is better - from my experience Chrome has more bugs in this
field.)


2011/12/14 Srikanth Ramakrishnan <parakara.ghoda at gmail.com>:
> Vickram, your tone makes it look like everything is our fault.
> We cannot switch over to Firefox/Linux for one simple reason.
> Most students here are from a Rural background and won't be able to
> adjust to new stuff. They had a tough time adjusting from Windows 7 to
> XP when the rollback was done due to issues with Turbo C++ and
> Microsoft COBOL compiler.
>
> --~~~~
>
> On 12/13/11, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>> 2011/12/14 Vickram Crishna <vvcrishna at radiophony.com>:
>>> Pardon my intrusion on this thread, but within reason*, if any college or
>>> other educational institution chooses to be 'proprietary only' (never mind
>>> antediluvian - IE6? really? or is that an XP issue?) FOSSers are prepared
>>> to
>>> take it up 'officially' with them, reminding them of the nation's
>>> commitment
>>> to education without strings attached. This is fyi to listers, and I
>>> shan't
>>> mention it again, but please do consider notifying your friendly
>>> neighbourhood FOSSer with details of the person to contact
>>> (principal/director etc) for assistance and action. This in turn will get
>>> reflected to a FOSS forum (fosscomm is one such) and will hopefully result
>>> in notifying the institution concerned as well as the possibility of a
>>> local
>>> FOSS-based firm offering upgrade services.
>>>
>>> *ie FOSS as a movement is in continuous need of resources as well, but
>>> education is a major priority
>>
>> It is a very valid point. Installing Firefox or at least updating to
>> IE8 on Windows XP costs nothing and has very tangible and
>> easy-to-demonstrate benefits for language support. Wiki Community
>> members should BE BOLD and tell libraries, schools and colleges that
>> they should do it.
>>
>> While you are at it, make sure that auto-updates are enabled and
>> consider installing a version of Firefox with menus translated to the
>> local language (see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html ; if
>> you can't find it your language, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n .)
>>
>> --
>> Amir E. Aharoni
>>
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>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
> Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
>
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