Our college has two sister schools in Cambodia (Sisowath High School and Beng Trabek High School, Phnom Penh) and we are one of the few schools in Australia that teaches Khmer as a LOTE subject to our secondary students.

I continue to be impressed with the continued team work by the Khmer Software Initiative that has enabled us to make a stable version of Cambodian available to our students for the first time. Already they have translated Kubuntu (KDE version) into Khmer and have yet to start on Ubuntu (Gnome version) Rosetta project. I have contacted somebody to see how we can help.

We are keen to set up a computer(s) with an Ubuntu operating system at our sister schools and organise Internet access. I hope that this group is able to help us out with the configuration, deployment over the next few months.

I am excited by the thought of a wider adoption of open standards, the respect and new freedoms that it provides to end users. I liked this article in the Free Software Magazine about the file format crossroad. It mentions an easter egg used by Microsoft in Office 97 to force an upgrade from earlier versions of Office. Other companies have played the same game.

On the other hand, users of free open source software are free to examine the file format. The end user is in control of the information created in their files. The Open Khmer team was only able to fully implement Cambodian with Open Office because they had a handle on the underlying code.

In a world where increasingly we are giving up precious freedoms, what direction should we encourage schools to take?

"We live in a world of ideas and it is the freedom to talk about those ideas which gives these ideas purpose. When we trade some of our freedom for convenience, we risk all of our freedoms."  read more