Alriyadh, a popular Saudi newspaper were kind enough to do an interview with me about CDMaftooh.

I took the opportunity to voice concerns about the Arabic Open Source movement, and voice out that we do actually need governmental/educational help to spread the word.

They published the interview in their 13th March 2007 issue. I’d love to get a hard copy from any of you my Saudi brothers! The server took a hard beating on that day, I thought It wouldn’t make it through, but it did.

Read the interview, It is in Arabic.

ArabicOpenCD, a project similar to Canonical’s OpenCD at opencd.org has just been developed and released. The ArabicOpenCD aims to maintain the most complete collection of open source software in a single CD for Windows operating systems. The software is of high quality and provides a suitable alternative to often pirated software in third world countries including Arab countries.

If you own or work at a CD shop, library, computer repair shop, OEM shop or pretty much any orgnisation then you could download the CD, burn it a few times and offer it for the public, or you could contact me and see what we can do. It is also really good for those who do not have a reliable fast conenction to the internet, and would rather have a big collection of software offline, or for those who would like to learn how to program by example, as the software is open source.

Finally, If you think you can contribute by translating software, well, yes you can. It doesn’t require much, and you can really make a difference. Much of the software has been translated to Arabic by various translators at Arabeyes, the rest need more contributors :~) please head to www.arabeyes.org, or if you have difficulty you can contact me.

Oh yeah, the ArabicOpenCD, you can get it here: www.arabicopencd.org . Many thanks to Bashar Al-Abdulhadi for buying the domain and setting up the hosting.