[dot] Japan KDE Users Group Interview

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1208472296/

From: Jonathan Riddell <>
Dept: oriental
Date: Thursday 17/Apr/2008, @15:44

Japan KDE Users Group Interview
===============================

   Despite their prominent position in the world as leaders of
technology, we hear from oriental countries quite rarely in the free
software world.  To find out what happens to KDE in the East, we asked
some questions to Daisuke Kameda
[http://www.kde.gr.jp/~daisuke/profile_en.html] (&#20096;&#30000;
&#22823;&#36628;) of the KDE Japan Users Group [http://www.kde.gr.jp/].
    Daisuke Kameda (&#20096;&#30000; &#22823;&#36628;)


              HOW DID THE JAPANESE KDE USERS GROUP START?

     It had its beginning when Junji Takagi made a patch for operating
mulitibyte characters such as Japanese, when Qt's version 1.x was
released. Qt 1.x couldn't operate mulitibyte characters, so we couldn't
use Japanese in KDE 1.x previously.

     After the patch was made, The Japan KDE Users' Group was launched
for aggregating the information about KDE/Qt in Japan.



               WHAT DOES THE JAPANESE KDE USERS GROUP DO?

     We do some activities such as message translation to Japanese,
making patch for multilingualisation, exchanging information about
KDE/Qt.

     But, the necessity of having multilingualisation patches is less
now.



                 HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE PART OF THE GROUP?

     There are 1000 mailing list subscribers. About 15 member is active
staff.



      WHY DO WE RARELY HEAR FROM JAPAN IN THE FREE SOFTWARE WORLD?

     Probably, there are some reason.

     First of all, free software is used frequently, but few people
participate in development of free software in Japan. For example, many
company use free software, but few companies contribute free software.

     Language difference is also big reason. Since Japanese population
and community are large, if the developer use only Japanese and stay in
Japan, he can be perfectly satisfied.
 Does our 4 version number
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_(number)#In_other_fields] cause
superstitious problems in Japan?
     It is not necessary to care. Many Japanese software was also
released version 4.



     ARE THERE ANY KDE DEVELOPERS IN JAPAN AND HOW CAN WE GET MORE?

     Unfortunately, there are few active KDE developers.

     We are also looking for the developers who are interested in KDE.
Possibly, we can use Google's Summer of Code for getting more.



       HOW ACTIVE IS THE TRANSLATION COMMUNITY FOR KDE IN JAPAN?

     The translation community is very active now :) Message translation
is almost 100% complete. But, we need more translators to translate
documentation.

     And, increasing translators is always welcomed.