On Thursday 30 May 2002 15:25, Fergus Wilde wrote: - I know RH is very big in the States, and no-one would deny that the States - is - clearly the biggest and most important single IT market - but is RH as - - dominant as all that in Europe and further Eastward? I had thought not, - but - ask in all innocence. As you say, you ask this in all innocence, but IMHO, the question really boils down to a wake up call for those like myself, that were at least partially drawn to Linux because we abhor the dominant US business model for software development, i.e. near total lack of support for languages other than English or only support for the so called "big" languages, i.e. French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. While I don't have a "French" take on this with language laws, official spellings, etc., I do agree that language, whether expressed through cinema, literature or software localization is CULTURE and should be preserved and regulated as such and not be something that should just be left up to market forces. Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Estonian, Finnish, Latvian Lithuanian are all relatively small languages (a lot smaller than French) that from time to time get the shaft from market forces because this or that language (believe me, there are a lot of others as well) is just too small to bother with, due to the small population (i.e. economic base). This has happened many times with Apple since Steve Jobs returned and it has also happened with Windows. We can't afford to let this happen to Linux. Personally, I don't believe that RH is the most popular distro in Europe, due to a lack of proper support for tools/resources for other languages (there are a few exceptions, at least there were in RH 7.0). It is important for an increased support of Linux distros that support a proliferation of languages and language tools. All of us should be aware of this issue when we buy our distros. That is why I chose SuSE ;-) It would be nice if policy makers, in the EU among other places, received a wake up call and realized that not only is it bad budgetary policy to be using and supporting MS/Windows in the halls of Brussels and Strasbourg, but it is also bad IT (information technology) security policy and bad culture policy. My .02 Euros ;-) Brian