Re: I need Help with some information

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2002 at 10:18:41AM -0800, moath abdullah wrote:
> Assalamo Alaycom
> Please every one help me with these information today 
> or tomorrow or on sunday. Sunday is the last chance 
> for me.
> 1- What is the relationship between Akka and bash? 
> What does it mean by saying that Akka uses a
> console?!!

There isn't any. Akka is a console app, meaning non-GUI. In other words,
it will not work under X. When you are on the console and you run Akka,
it intercepts all input and output, filtering it and allowing you to 
read/write Arabic.

> 2- Who started Arabeyes? And when?

A few of us were disappointed with the lack of Arabic support on the
linux/unix platforms and decided to do something about it ourselves.

The Arabeyes project used to be under the name 'Aunyx', which was started
on January 2001.  Our main recruiting efforts targeted the underground and
hacker world, under the assumption that they would be more familiar
with linux/unix systems.  That search did not yield the expected results.
Plus the mandate and steps, during our aunyx days, weren't very clear and
didn't seem to lend themselves to a concrete goal.

During the Aunyx days, most of the work concentrated on documentation and
how to go about it.  Several papers/proposals were written on the subject.
Then, in the summer of 2001 with the addition of a few more members we
changed our name to Arabeyes in an attempt to make it a catchier, easier
to remember and spell :-).  We also rethought and revamped throughly our
approach and how to attain our goals.  Its truely funny that most of those
exchanges and emails are still on our 'general' mailing-list archives; your
readers might find it amusing to read some of those postings - July/August
time-frame.

With the change over to Arabeyes we adapted a charter and looked at past
projects' failures and successes, and decided that this effort is larger
than any and all of us and that the project is paramount and should survive
irrespective of the founders.  We decided to adopt an Open Source license
to further enlighten the Arabic world of its existence and its importance.
We wanted to put something together that was a grass-roots effort in which
decisions are made by consensus not based on politics or money, but on
technical merit with the notion that the "best idea wins" always.

---
Because our philosophy in Arabeyes is that this is a grass-roots effort, the
question of who started what takes a backseat. If you must know, I was the one
who started the Aunyx project, which was soon joined by Chahine Hamila (author
of Akka). When Nadim Shaikli came across Aunyx back in July 2001, he put forth
several suggestions and the project was re-ignited. The name was changed to
Arabeyes and it quickly evolved to what it is today. If you want to see the
way things happened, it is all archived in the 'general' list archives:
  http://lists.arabeyes.org/general/
[start with the July 2001 archives]

Unfortunately, all the earlier public correspondence for Aunyx were done on
arabhackers.org -- that site degenerated to a bunch of little kids fighting
and the archives are no longer there.

> 3- Who started QT arabizing and KDE and when?

The majority of the work done on the Qt library was done by Trolltech. I
believe Haydar (of HaydarLinux) has submitted several patches. However, the
majority of the work was done by Trolltech. KDE automatically supports Arabic
as they move to Qt3, so very little work that is specific to Arabic is
required by the individual application developer. As far as the translation of
the interface goes, it was started on August 20, 2001. 

> 4- Who has work on arabizing mozilla? and when he 
> started?

The people who worked on Mozilla are also primarily Mozilla developers. To be
more specific, Netscape employees. IBM did submit a few patches regarding
Arabic -- most of which were rejected. Arabeyes has mainly been reporting bugs
and testing (as far as Mozilla is concerned). 

Hope that helps.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://fakkir.net/~elzubeir/|
-------------------------------------------------------
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