Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 100)

OK, from now on, whenever you see some free software project requiring you to be not in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba and other countries where us terrorists live, or require you to not give the software to terrorists such as us, it would be very helpful if you tell me (roozbeh at gmail dot com). I wish to make sure they know their software is not ‘Open Source’.

To copy clause 5 of The Open Source Definition, “[...] Some countries, including the United States, have export restrictions for certain types of software. An OSD-conformant license may warn licensees of applicable restrictions and remind them that they are obliged to obey the law; however, it may not incorporate such restrictions itself.”

A few free software projects do that (incorporate such restrictions), and have been doing it for a long while. I guess it can’t really get more explicit than what OSD says. I’m planning to go inform them one by one.

We may be from a country whose nationals are automatically considered suspicious for even thinking about visiting the United States (for whatever reason the US administration may have, that may think it can make life harder for the Iranian government by making it harder for Iranian nationals), but we can’t stand our “freedom-loving friends” doing the same to us through their lawyers.

BTW, how many of you have been fingerprinted using black ink, weighted, and photographed when you entered a country just because of your nationality? If yes, did that make you miss your connecting flight which had a three-hour safe margin? If yes, did they also photocopy all your airplane tickets and the boarding pass for the next flight and in the process lost the ticket? If yes, did that require you to stay the night in a city as large as Los Angeles with no hotel reservation and nobody to call in a country that you are visiting for the first time? Still yes? Who are you, North Korean or something?!

Wow! Apparently I share the same Chinese given name with Donald Knuth, one of my personal heroes. It is 德纳, or Dénà in Pinyin. I don't know if Hong knew about this.

(Thanks to Ming Hua, a self-described “Chinese GNOME user” for pointing me to the similarity.)

Well, I got my Chinese name back again, after an email from Hong Feng. This is a name he gave me in 2002 when I met him in Trivandrum.

The name is 普德纳. That’s U+666E U+5FB7 U+7EB3, and is pronounced somehow like “Pu DeNa” (my family name is Pournader).

The kDefinition field in the Unihan database gives respectively “universal, general, widespread”, “ethics, morality, virtue”, and “admit, take, receive, accept”. Back in India, Hong explained to me that to him it means something like someone who recieves virtue from different sources/people and then redistributes it. The “virtue” part is a reference to my first name.

The meaning interestingly resembles to what I’ve been doing for a few years now. I have tried to gather all those different and contradictory local requirements and the solutions the globalization technology provides for them, understand them, and then write them down or implement them (or get them implemented) in software.

The Iranian situations: I don’t know much about right and wrong according to divine beings, but something is utterly wrong when things like this happen:

Did these things happen in the same Tehran where I‘m living? Yes. Can I believe it? No.

For those who haven’t heard, that is the Iranian “independent students” putting the Danish embassy to fire and then occupying it for a while, last night.

Of course it can’t have any relation with, and is totally independent of, the Minister of Commerce’s announcement that they will not allow Danish goods to enter Iran anymore, and will not let Danish ships enter the Iranians seas.

Well, the way things go here in Iran, that’s just a little “warning”, of course. They rarely do this to foreigners, but well, ...

Hossein Derakhshan has interestingly written about the same thing that was eating me in this post of mine (United States helping Ahmadinejad get elected). The main difference is that it is published in New York times, while I write in Advogato.

So I recommend reading Democracy's Double Standard (registration is required).

Guardian’s Simon Jenkins: “Nor would the "coward's war" of economic sanctions be any more effective. Refusing to play against Iranian footballers (hated by the clerics), boycotting artists, ostracising academics, embargoing commerce, freezing foreign bank accounts - so-called smart sanctions - are as counterproductive as could be imagined. Such feelgood gestures drive the enemies of an embattled regime into silence, poverty or exile.”

One can’t be more right. Many of these have already been in effect of course, resulting in the empowerment of the government and the weakening of the general public.

As an small example, the commerce embargo means that most IT companies will not be able to outsource anything to Iran, resulting in the only viable business strategy of local companies to be selling to the government. Vendor monopolies are bad, sure, but guess how bad is a customer monopoly.

Silence, poverty, and exile? So accurate.

US vs Iran: I just read Let's make sure we do better with Iran than we did with Iraq by Guardian's Timothy Garton Ash. Apparently he understands the situation.

Mono and Fedora: Wow, I can't believe this! Is this the end of the struggle?

i18n design: Michael Kaplan has an interesting post called How to be un-international, which reminds me that i18n features, like everything else in the UI, must be designed. You can't just throw features there, just because someone asked for it and your developers did an (extended somehow?) implementation.

Silence news: Having been a silent here for a while, I guess some people may be interested to know what has happened in the meanwhile.

• Regarding the Persian calendar in .NET, Miguel wrote to me and somehow challenged me for a patch to add Persian calendar support to Mono. I had never seen any C# code before, nor had run any Mono application, but could do it in a short time anyway. In the meanwhile, I practically redid the algorithm, to a level that now the introductory comments seem to be longer than the core code. Miguel then checked in my code almost verbatim, and now you can see comments like // FIXME: this may need a "static". I don't know enough C# in the code. I guess Mono critics can now say “Well, they even let people who don't know C# code for them, guess the rest”!
• I got accepted as a Fedora Extras packager (first package: gentium-fonts). I consider the experience very educational for our own Sharif Linux. Since I was sponsored by Daniel (I put my GNOME/GUADEC relations to (ab)use), he somehow needs to cleanup after all my mistakes!
• I officially resigned from the project that called itself “National Project for Farsi Linux” (and now calls itself “National Project for Free and Open Source Software”), after not attending their meetings for a while. The project is a monopoly in attracting what the Iranian government wants to spend in developing free software, and directing it to contractors who don’t necessarily know enough about free software. I guess this will help me concentrate more of my resources on what that project was actually supposed to do. (People like Behdad always told me they won't achieve anything technically useful, but I was optimistic). I am still trying to be kind to them, by not raising the numerous dark points of their record publicly, but that's very hard, specially since the highest level people in that project have called me names (“illiterate”, etc.), publicly and privately, after I had criticized someone else for plagiarism and violating the Iranian copyright law (the old story is mention briefly here). I agree I’m illiterate in several matters including politics (but perhaps not including Iranian copyright law), but I believe PhDs don’t bring literacy either.
• We started an Iranian Free Software Association. The Persian word for free as in speech just means that (and does not mean gratis), so there was no need to add things like Open Source/FOSS/Libre/..., which do not make much sense when translated to Persian.
• We achieved supported language status for Persian in GNOME 2.12.2. I“d love to thank all the contributors, but specially Meelad Zakaria and Elnaz Sarbar.