Akruti Fonts Pirated by INDIVIDUAL and CORPORATION, Anand S.K. - Cyberscape Multimedia Ltd.

[ellakannada]

In a message dated 6/12/2004 5:29:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time, anand@cyberscapeindia.com writes:

Namaskara,

I entirely agree with Shri Janardhana regarding the need to hold a meeting of all present and former members like myself to straighten out the matters
raised by the various Kannada Computing enthusiasts.

However more important than setting records right and clearing up past injustices is to articulate very clearly, what we intend to do in the future
to see the application and growth of Kannada in all electronic and information technology devices. With the convergence of Telecom and IT, many
new challenges lie ahead for the growth of language technology, much beyond the PC.

What clearly is the need of the day is a vision statement with a roadmap of what needs to be done and what can be practically achieved the next few years and delegate the responsibilities to interested entities and also debate on how the funds and resources will be raised and distributed amongst the participants and how the milestones and disbursals would be monitored.

My personal opinion is that by involving and depending beyond a point on the Government, either at the state or the centre is a sure recipe for failure and I think we need to muster the resources and support from private sponsors and create viable self sustaining models for future development of Kannada.

I think the task of Kannada implementation in IT and convergence areas is a huge and complex task and needs co-operation from all well meaning Kannadigas and instead of wasting energies on a few wayward individuals or organizations, let us concentrate on the task ahead.

Vandanegalu,

Anand S.K.
M.D.
Cyberscape Multimedia Ltd.

P.S.: As far as specific points raised at the meeting of May 25th at CIIL, Mysore is concerned, these are my personal reactions:

While most of the points were clarified correctly by Pavanaja and others at the meeting, I have comments regarding these:

1. Open Source Initiative: I think no where is the world does an open source initiative depend on either the government or the bureaucracy, the very idea of open source is based on passionate support by individuals and autonomous groups. The moment a government or bureaucracy steps in, the idea is dead. At best outside support from them should be welcome and not a screening commitee under MIT or DIT as suggested.

2. OpenType Kannada Fonts: I think Pavanaja has put it quite rightly, that unless there is an incentive for putting quality Kannada fonts into public domain, no commercial organization like ours which has a wealth of such fonts would be willing to do so. We who have been developing such fonts (AKRUTI) well over two decades would not like a repeat of the experience, we had when our fonts were pirated off the Web and used without acknowledgement, first by an individual who went on to release a free software and then by an organization which followed suit. Unless IPR is recognized and compensated for, you can expect very little to happen. I am also happy to inform that three high quality Opentype fonts in Kannada called Sampige and Mallige and Kedage (developed commercially by us for RCILTS-Kannada, IISC, Bangalore) by us are available in public domain for general usage. More can be done provided proper mechanisms are set in place. " Quality always comes at a price, so if you pay peanuts all you can hire are monkeys !! "

3. GOK and GOI involvement: I think while it is important to rally around the government to support the efforts to develop Kannada, it is high time we broke out of the "Mai Baap" mentality in the 21st century to refer every issue to the government or its functionaries and hope that they will solve it for us. I personally feel that if the issue of Kannada usage has to rely on government patronage or is so sick that it needs continual oxygen from the state then it is better for us to administer "Euthanasia" and solve the problem once and for all. Ultimately, it must become commercially viable and necessary to communicate in Kannada whether verbally, textually or electronically for development to happen and be self sustaining. Kannada has survived over 2000 years without any significant State patronage, so let us not be unduly worried that it will die in the electronic medium so soon, especially when the whole world seems to be recognizing that India and more specifically Karnataka and Bangalore will be playing an increasingly greater role on the world stage.


Anand S.K.
M.D.
Cyberscape Multimedia Ltd.

[chandraise]

Iam chandrashekaraiah M N studying 3rs Sem M.tech in RV college, Bangalore. I would like to do my academic project on Kannada Language Processing. Our idea of project is to
"aggregiate most of the kannada news papers that are available online. We need to save all the news paper information in database from the past some years.
The information retrieved by crawling these websites can be converted and put into an aggregation.

An added search functionality, feature to add various other news feeds would help Kannada users find news in Kannada about any topic anytime. "

So please could u help me out the encoding techniques to Unicode and why we need encoding.
And also please try to give some information of technology we need to follow to carry out this task.

Reply to my mail id : chandraise@gmail.com


Thanking you,
chandrashekaraiah M N