Ciao Frederico,
Am Donnerstag, 21. Mai 2009 schrieb Federico Leva:
Thank you. So, you won't develop Kiwix, but a separate reader. My only question is: what do you need (money and/or people) to be able to make it saleable (for Linux, Mac and Windows) within, say, October or November?
to clarify: Our aim is to provide tools to create such DVDs. Our zimreader is only a sample application.
libzim can be used by everyone who wants to make his or her own Wikipedia reader and use ZIM as a storage format. This results in all Wikipedia readers and dumps will be compatible, meaning that every user can choose his or her favourite reader application and get new Wikipedia dumps from whomever provides a fresh ZIM file.
Emmanuel Engelhart, the developer of Kiwix is also part of the openZIM developer team.
For making the italian DVD you have several options: * you hire someone to make ZIM files using zimwriter and a reader application using libzim you ship on your DVD
* you take zimwriter to make your ZIM file and ship the zimreader or Kiwix on your DVD
* you ask someone of our team - most likely Emmanuel - if he is willing to create a DVD for you, using Kiwix or zimreader
openZIM does not make or publish DVDs, except of this sample DVD for LinuxTag which is a demonstration object for us.
We may offer some contract. When the implementation is ready, we will offer an [almost] ready-to-use DVD to a publisher to sell it: they should be able to clean up the database by themselves, but they're not able to produce a good engine.
I didn't really get that part. We provide you with the software - it is up to you which articles you put into a ZIM file. The reader software is also available. As an alternative we provide a simple library for software developers so they can implement ZIM without having to get their hands on it.
BTW, if you want I can send you the beta of the DVD the italian publisher prepared: the GUI is similar to Kiwix's one, it was designed to be FLOSS, based on XHTML, and runs only on Windows (quite the opposite of yours).
I would be pretty interested, especially in the source code. So if it is online just sent a link to this mailinglist.
Greets,
Manuel