In Cambodia, the issue is language

Free software makes sense to Cambodia because it allows a small country of a little over 13 million to work towards language solutions that are relevant to it.

In Cambodia, it's all about language Norbert Klein was, at one time, the only German national in Cambodia. In this country since the late 'eighties, his is an interesting story of why he came here, and what all he did. Currently he's advisor to the director of the Open Forum of Cambodia. His network is one of those working on local Khmer language solutions.

"Our main point (of promoting Free and Open Source Software, FOSS, in Cambodia) is that it supports local language solutions. And we do say, by the way, that it is also legal to copy FOSS," he says.

He points out that in the field of localisation, Cambodia has to face nto just the language problem "but also the font problem".

There are now over 20 different types of (often incompatible) being used to write Khmer in, says Klein. "We have been trying to highlight the role of Unicode (which provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers) since 2001." But the attention hasn't been quite there. Klein says they have had to point out that the Unicode isn't just another font.

He points to the need for more written material coming out of small countries like Cambodia (population 13.4 million). Among the early adopters of IT were some of Cambodia's expat population which includes 400,000 in the US, and others in France, Australia, Canada and elsewhere.

But, says Klein, the question before smaller societies remains how to utilise the tools that computers and IT offer for productive purposes,