Bhutan's Government: Gross National Happiness, Yes; Sense Of Humor, Not So Much

Aside from its spectacular location up in the Himalayas, the Kingdom of Bhutan is probably best known for eschewing measurements of Gross Domestic Product in favor of Gross National Happiness: 

On Techdirt.

Saving Limbu from Linguistic Limbo

There's a fair amount of acrimony flying around the OLPC XO machine at the moment, which is a pity. Because the real story is stuff like this old but still important post that I came across recently:

The development team at OLPC Nepal have been working hard on developing various learning activities for children using the XO. A significant area in which they have been making progress has been in creating activities to help children learn their local dialect.

The first dialect to be setup for use on the XO is Limbu. This is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than 300,000 people in eastern Nepal as well as parts of Myanmar, Bhutan and India.

This is a really exciting development and is a positive counter to concerns that the OLPC project will only serve to homogenise indigenous cultures. In fact, the project may aid the long term preservation and viability of minority dialects and culture which are no longer part of the curriculum in the traditional school teaching models.

I always was a sucker for those Tibeto-Burman languages....

Why Developing Nations Love Free Software

How about for these reasons?

- In Georgia, most library management systems are available in English or Russian… any student of eastern European politics will understand why Georgians don’t want to use a Russian-language tool. Open software can be translated and adapted into different languages.

In Bhutan, there’s a great desire to preserve the local language - Dzonghka - against the encroachment of Mandarin Chinese. Local authorities wanted a Dzonghka version of Windows, and raised some money to demonstrate a market for the software, but weren’t able to persuade Microsoft to create the product. But it wasn’t difficult to localize Linux, and there’s now Dzongkha Linux, with support for Open Office, GAIM, Mozilla and other key pieces of software.

- There’s a strong desire in developing world libraries to put digital collections online… which suprises many library professionals in the developed world, as they’re just moving towards digital collections now. Sadler quotes a Ghanaian librarian: “Students in Ghana can view artifacts from Britain more easily tha they can artifacts from their own heritage.” Open source software systems like Greenstone are allowing libraries to scan and preseve documents and share them online. There’s a hope in the future for a pan-African digital library which will allow libraries across the continent to share their resources.

More on Dzonghka: Microsoft's Morals

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for Bhutan's Dzonghkha language and its use in free software, so I was naturally intrigued by Andrew Leonard's recent post on the subject. This led me to the following, which somehow I had missed when it first came out:

Microsoft has barred the use of the Bhutanese government’s official term for the Bhutanese language, Dzongkha, in any of its products, citing that the term had affiliations with the Dalai Lama. In an internal memorandum, Microsoft employees were told not to use the term Dzongkha in any Microsoft software, language lists or promotional materials since “Doing so implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China. In this instance, replace “Dzongkha” with ‘Tibetan - Bhutan’.”

How's that for a perfect confluence: Dzongkha-Tibetan-Chinese repression-Microsoft-free software? Nothing like a little moral prostitution to boost that bottom line, eh Microsoft?