Oakland, CA — (press release excerpt) — Less than a year after the initial release of the OpenI18N Standard (formerly Li18nux), the Free Standards Group announced the launch of the OpenI18N Certification program. OpenI18N Certification will utilize an independent authority to verify whether a Linux distribution is adhering to the community and industry developed internationalization standard.

OpenI18N defines internationalization framework and localization variables such as language, currency, time, input display, print format, paper size, address, phone number, date and name formats, and calendaring. OpenI18N also handles advanced capabilities like shape editing, writing direction, combining characters and ligature – features needed to render a number of languages such as Indic and Thai – and multilingual input methods. OpenI18N also includes a comprehensive test suite and documentation.

With more than 6500 languages spoken worldwide and no open framework for application developers to plug the different languages into, native language computing has remained out of reach to most of the world market. OpenI18N has led the development of the framework, freely available implementations, written specification and tools, allowing software developers to write truly globalized programs. The OpenI18N standard provides a paradigm of “write once, run anywhere in the world”, saving application developers many person-hours, increasing capabilities while reducing time-to-market.

“The Free Standards Group and its OpenI18N Workgroup have been moving rapidly to create standards that literally makes the computer adjust itself to human languages and culturally specific aspects, rather than making the user adjust to the computer,” said Scott McNeil, Free Standards Group executive director. “Internationalization is a key element in the continued growth of Linux and Open Source worldwide.”

“OpenI18N is being developed by a global body of Open Source developers,” said Hideki Hiura, OpenI18N Workgroup chair. “Our new workgroup name, OpenI18N, better reflects the fact that while the standard is built on Linux, the framework is truly open. This allows for the adoption of the standard by any computer operating system. This is Open Source development at its best.”

The OpenI18N Certification program was not created to be a profit center for the Free Standards Group. Prices are kept to a minimum to encourage developers and Linux distributions to become OpenI18N Certified.

 
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