This is not the first attempt to bring Arabic support to the Unix environment. However, with better planning, excursion and a bit of ingenuity Arabeyes is planned to extend well beyond past successes and avoid previous failures and mistakes. Arabeyes, its contents and projects will live-on irrespective of maintainer, location or sponsorship -- that in itself is a shift in previous paradigms.
Unix systems have great potential in the fields of stability, scalability, and speedy development cycles. In fact, a quick look at the history of the Linux operating system would show that in one decade it was able to present itself as a serious system, developed by computer enthusiasts and professionals alike, over the Internet.
The Free Software Foundation (launched in 1984) provides a complete Unix-like operating system which is free. The concept of free software is a new one to the Arab world (in fact, the compliance with international copyright laws is relatively new worldwide). Free Software will allow for accelerated development (which has not been possible with in-house closed-source projects), and a transparency which will give incentive to excel and compete productively.
The costs endured by educational institutes could be drastically cut by using better and free software. This provides for a good foundation to more secure systems (not limited to schools) - as the dependence on foreign software is kept to a bare minimum.
The Arabeyes project complies with the Open Source concepts and ideals. In fact, the adoption of the open source licenses is a fundamental part of the project's philosophy.
The utilization of a CVS Repository (which is world-accessible) provides developers with:
An easy way of maintaining code and other miscellaneous project items.
Adding and improving upon existing work concurrently.
Ensuring a long lifespan for the project, regardless of commitment of the oringinal developers.
Mailing list(s) are setup so questions and related issues can be addressed and discussed. General Arabic Linux/Unix FAQ's[3] and specific-project FAQ's are provided to serve as a first-place-to-look for those with questions.
Decisions are taken by the 'core' team. This core group is made up of key individuals who are contributing to the project on a multitude of ways.
It is hard to take a linear approach when it comes to Arabization. Some of the important things that need to be tackled are:
Fonts
The wide variation of fonts and lack of compliance with existing standards only makes the Arabization process more challenging. The issue of fonts must be addressed seriously and quickly.
Libraries
GTK/Pango and Qt provide varying Arabic support. Currently Qt3 seems to be promising.
Console/Interface
The console level, Akka provides Arabic support to input/output in Arabic. This allows for use under the lynx browser (text-based web browser), and other minimal console usages.
Mail/Chat/Spell/other Applications
Basic applications will have to be addressed to round a person's daily needs.
Desktop (GUI)
The desktop environment is envisioned as the most challenging and least "must-have" chain in the link. Gnome/KDE/etc arabization will be addressed as a by-product of all the underlying work that needs to happen to augment the list above.
Since we rely on voluntary work, financial sponsorship will go directly towards the project and not individuals. All donations (if and when) will be strictly used on software/hardware on a need-basis for Arabeyes projects. Monetary exchanges will be made available to donors upon request.