Perfidious Albania

I've been very lucky in my travels. I've visited many of the obvious places, and quite a few of the less obvious ones, including exotica like Fiji, Samarkand and the Kashmir Valley. But one place I've never made it to is Albania.

Partly as a result of this failure - and partly for reasons to do with hearing about the country's wonderfully-named King Zog back in my schooldays - Albania has always fascinated me. So when the chance came up to combine two of the things I love doing - travelling and talking about free software - I was naturally delighted. Of course, there was no money involved, but travelling and accommodation expenses were covered, so I just needed to put together a presentation to "pay" for the trip.

This I duly did, leading with what I thought was a rather clever segue. For despite my impressions of Albania as a mysterious and exotic land, it turns out that not only does its population speak an Indo-European language - which is thus related to English (I knew that) - but that the very name "Albania" may have the same roots as my local "Albion" (which was news to me). This sharing of a common heritage let me lead very naturally into my main topic of sharing in the context of free software and beyond.

And thus it was, yesterday, just a few days before the conference this weekend, with my presentation - complete with witty segue - all ready to go, that I heard from the organisers that despite several emails assuring me to the contrary, they didn't have any money for my travel, and so wouldn't be paying for my flight tomorrow evening.

Which was a real pity, since I'd already bought the non-refundable ticket, after being assured - in writing - that I would be re-imbursed when I got there. The person who I had been dealing with kindly offered to pay for this out of his own pocket, but that obviously wouldn't have been fair on him: it was for the conference to find the money, not individuals.

Moreover, since the conference still seemed to have plenty of money to pay for other speakers at the conference (some of whom were coming from very far-flung - and hence expensive - parts), I could only assume that my talk wasn't really that crucial to the proceedings, and wouldn't really be missed if I didn't turn up.

I'd still love to visit Albania, which sounds a fascinating and fast-evolving place, but I don't think I'll be giving any talks while I'm there...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Freedom, in Other Words

Recently the blogosphere went slightly bonkers over a story that "the Korean government plans to select a city and a university late next month where open-source software like Linux will become the mainstream operating programs." It seems to have been the concept of a "Linux city" that really caught people's attention (though surely "Linux city" must refer to Helsinki?). But the significance of this announcement is perhaps not quite what most people think.

As the article rightly pointed out, there's nothing new in the idea of a city powered by free software: the much-ballyhooed Munich conversion to open source was along the same lines. And there are plenty of other, smaller-scale deployments that show that free software is up to the job. But there is another element in this story that is in some ways more interesting.

Yes, open source can now offer all the usual elements - operating system, browser, email, office apps - that people need for their daily computing; but even more impressively, it can do this in many languages. In other words, there is now a multi-dimensional depth to free software: not only in terms of the apps that have been created, but also with regard to the languages in which many of those apps are available natively.

For example, Firefox boasts versions in languages such as Asturian, Basque, Macedonian and Slovenian, with several others - Armenian, Gujarati and Mongolian - listed as "Not Yet Available", implying that they will be. OpenOffice.org does even better, offering versions in languages such as Albanian, Azerbaijani, Galician, Khmer and Sango (new to me). There is an even longer list of languages that includes others that are being worked on.

And if that doesn't impress you, well, you must be pretty jaded linguistically. So consider this: for many of these languages, you can download the program for three platforms: GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X. "Get The Facts", as Microsoft loves to say; but the ones it cares to give are partial, and they strangely omit any mention of this factual strength-in-depth that only free software can offer.

Indeed, there have been various cases where national governments of smaller nations have all but begged Microsoft to port some of its products to their language, only to be refused on the grounds that it wasn't economically "viable" to do so. Which just goes to show how complicated is the warp and weft of software and power, culture and money.

Viability has never been much of an issue for free software; if it had been, Richard Stallman would never have bothered starting it all off in the first place. As far as he is concerned, there's only one word that matters, whatever the language, and that's freedom. As the sterling work underway to produce localised versions of open source software emphasises, that includes the freedom to work in your own tongue.