Re: KacstQr is incomplete

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

This was mailed to me in private due to the server being down.

### Orig Email ###
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 12:39:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: N. Heer <heer (at) u washington edu>
Subject: Re: KacstQr is incomplete

Nadim,

	I used to know some of the people at Sakhr's office in the USA.
In 1996 I even wrote a review of their Arabic word processor for the
magazine Multilingual Computing.  I've since lost contact with them and I
don't even know whether they still have an office in the US.  It may be
that Sakhr/Harf avoids anything to do with open-source software for fear
they will antagonize Microsoft.  They lost a case they raised against
Microsoft a number of years ago when some of their programmers in Kuwait
defected to Microsoft.  Maybe I can renew some of my old contacts with
Sakhr.

Nicholas

On Sun, 10 Aug 2003, Nadim Shaikli wrote:

> --- "N. Heer" <heer at u dot washington dot edu> wrote:
> > I think you are correct that Harf.com's offerings are not open-source.
> > But perhaps they could be persuaded to put the Qur'anic fonts in the
> > public domain.  It's hard to imagine that anyone would claim to have a
> > copyright or patent on anything directly related to the text of the
> > Qur'an.
>
> Nicholas, we've tried on a number of occasions to contact Sakhr.com on
> unrelated matters (along with a number of other companies) and we never
> even so much as got a "No" reply - its as though our emails were being
> piped to their /dev/null equivalent :-)
>
> I highly suggest you take up the matter and try to contact Harf and whomever
> else you can think of.  The more new faces that ping them the more pressure
> they should feel with regard to these issues -- I guess having them see the
> virtues of Open Source due to peer pressure is not the best way to go about
> it, but what else do we have in terms of options (I know no one that works
> there to get an inside contact to bring this topic forward to management).
>
> Regards,
>
>  - Nadim


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