“Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it will release the
source code for the internationalization technologies for the
Solaris Operating Environment to X.org, a non-profit,
international consortium responsible for standards requirements in
the X Window System. This code, made available under the X license,
will provide open source software developers with an easy way to
design applications which operate in virtually all national
language environments and among the operating systems that utilize
X-windowing technologies, such as Linux and Unix variants.”
“Until now, open source developers have typically had to write
additional code for each separate national language they wanted to
support in their application. This internationalization technology
provides developers a comprehensive environment for developing
applications that will run in multiple national languages around
the world, allowing access to a significantly broader market using
the same amount of coding effort. As this code becomes adopted by
the open source development community, more global users will have
access to applications in their native language.”
“To date, many open source applications could not reach
international markets because applications have needed additional
customized code for each spoken language and locale,” said Mike
Rogers, Sun’s Vice President of Global Engineering and Information
Services. “This release of code will accelerate the availability of
globalized applications for the UNIX systems community in the same
way that Java technology accelerated availability of cross-platform
applications.”