“IBM today made it easier for developers to create multilingual
applications by offering free and public access to the source code
for software that enables applications to work in different
languages and countries.
“The IBM Classes for Unicode**, based on the Unicode industry
standard, is the first software package available under a new IBM
Public Source License. The license, a direct result of
collaboration with the open-source community, allows source code —
software’s DNA equivalent — to be downloaded freely off the Web.
Developers can use the software, change it and share their
improvements with others.
“Using the Unicode classes, developers using a range of
operating systems, including Linux**, the open-source system, can
write applications that support a wide variety of global languages.
Applications can be easily localized by changing simple data files
to automatically adapt dates, currencies numbering schemes and
characters to fit an individual country’s language format.”