The project pursues three goals:
    • To set the ground for an alternative operating system in Iran based on the localization of GNU/Linux and the most widely used Free/Open Source software.
    • To eradicate the essential problems associated with the Persian language in the GNU/Linux internationalization process and most popular FOSS.
    • Enhancing people awareness and promoting the FOSS
  The government’s reasons to support this project are:
    • Building a reliable and secure Information Technology infrastructure
    • Vendor Independence
    • Ease of localization
    • Copyright and membership of WTO issues
    • Long term financial benefit
    • Promoting local software industry

  Three different policies have been adopted to reach the above goals. The first one is to involve all the stakeholders; the government making the necessary policies and funding the projects; the university leading the project technically, and the private companies executing different sub-projects and internationalize the outputs. The second is the provision of human resources by producing training materials such as GNU/Linux educational slides, E-learning courses, and computer based training contents which are going to be available to all people at negligible costs. The third is the promotion of FOSS within applications such as seminars, papers, interviews, newsletters and books.

  According to GNU/Linux localization process three different technical phases have been recognized in this project.
    • Basic tools and libraries to support Farsi in the GNU/Linux.
  At this phase five projects including "Unicode Bi-directional Algorithm and Joining," "Persian Sorting, Loose Searching and Persian Locale Requirements", “The Jalali Calendar", "Persian Keyboard”, and "Persian Open Type and Reference Font," were defined.
    • Applying the results of the first phase to the important GNU/Linux libraries and applications such as GNU C library (glibc), KDE base library (QT, KDE Base), GNOME base library (gtk+) and NOVELL Evolution.
In this phase some server-side Persian language support in MySQL, PostgreSQL, IMP (Web-based mail client) were also considered. The other project was Shabdix which is a live GNU/Linux CD based on KNOPPIX with Persian interface. The CD is intended to familiarize users with GNU/Linux.
The Persian Graphical User Interface Specifications and Guidelines project and a reference translation dictionary project will make the development activities of the projects to be standard and compatible.
    • At the final phase, some popular FOSS such as OpenOffice and Mozilla will be extended to support Persian language.
  Translation of the well-known GNU/Linux desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME and Webmin (web-based server management) will also be done in this phase. Design of beautiful fonts is also an essential project which is under progress.
  Currently, most of the projects of the second phase (except KDE and GNOME libraries) have been completed and the third phase projects that their dependencies have been satisfied are in progress.
  The outputs of all sub-projects are required to be accepted by the international maintainers of the source code. Therefore, all results of the project are available not only at the Iran FOSS project site but also from the international distributors. In this regard, the support of Farsi will gradually be added to all well-known international distributions of the software.

  Some local Iranian companies such as DPI (the highest ranking Iranian IT company) have just started to package the results and create their own commercial distribution for local users. It is expected to have a good number of these type of Iranian distributions by mid 2006. It is interesting to note that currently there are at least three GNU/Linux live/installable distributions without any commercial support available in the market (Learnux, Parsix and Farlix).
  For further information, you may contact us in the following ways:
      Email: info@foss.ir
      Tel: +9821 66027239
      Fax: +9821 6047662