I found an interesting piece of news in my inbox today: OpenOffice.org is going to release yet another set of African locales, namely Sango, Lingala, Luganda, and English (Ghana). I was not aware this open office project in the first place so now that I read more about it I feel obliged to spread the word around. OpenOffice.org is free software that anyone can download and it is compatible with other major office suites. The interesting thing is that the project is taking into account locales in African languages and their impressive list of available locales is only growing. Here’s what it means in practise – the quote is from a mailing list:

[...] in the long term it means that they can now create documents correctly tagged as having being written in that language. For most Africans who do not have locale support for their language they will traditionally write the document in their language while the computer assumes it is written in American English. While this works it is causing inestimable long term damage; search engines cannot find Lingala documents, we cannot draw text from Sango documents to help build spell checkers or do language research. But now for these languages and for users using OpenOffice.org they can create documents correctly labeled and in the future help researchers and users of their content access it correctly.

If you know anyone who might not be able to afford a MS Office Suite or other rather expensive available software, let them hear about OpenOffice.org!