My Experience with OpenSource Projects PART-1:

I finished my BE computer science and Engineering during the year 1999. I joined in Dishnet DSL (Now acquired by Tata Telecom) as a programmer trainee.

Dishnet was an ISP(Internet service provider). That time Dishnet was the only ISP running their entire technology stack in Microsoft technologies.Microsoft was also very proud about that.

I was developing web applications in classical ASP, SQL Server etc. I was also involved in various integration projects at Dishnet. Dishnet was running a language portal site www.ambalam.com. Writer Sujatha was the adviser of the website.Since am passionate about language computing, I volunteered to test windows 2000 language support. With that I got introduced to Writer Sujatha. I started working on ambalam.com project as well as other networking projects. Eventually I took over the entire maintenance of www.ambalam.com. I managed the entire technical team of ambalam.com.

While managing ambalam.com I got opportunity to explore linux technologies. Out of my own interest I got Manderak CD from IIT Madras and installed Linux.

The entire localization of linux was started by NRI's and I got interest and wanted to see the linux tamil desktop. I got the contact of Ma.Sivakumar(he was doing business in China). Shiva is a good mentor and language enthusiast.With his help I was able to see Linux in Tamil with few resource string translated. On seeing tamil in OS I was really excited and decided to contribute to Linux localization effort. 

I was translating few files and proof reading few and I felt it doesn't scale. I felt that this project needs a big push to complete all translations and see the desktop completely in Tamil. We decided to show the current status to Writer Sujatha to get more support.

We went to his house and showed the desktop. He said he will support our effort as well as help in translation, coining words etc(Kalai chollakkam).First phase we decided to translate A Desktop (KDE), A Browser(FireFox) and An office application (Open Office) and create a separate Linux distribution.

….My Experience will continue