NepaLinux awarded the prestigious Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Chris Nicol Free

NepaLinux, a localized Linux Distribution in Nepali developed by Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP),Nepal has been awarded the prestigious international APC Chris Nicol FOSS Prize 2007, jointly with Free Geek (an organization based in the United States of America and working for the promotion of FOSS), as announced in the official website http://www.apc.org/english/chrisnicol/ today. The APC Chris Nicol FOSS Prize is a biennial prize established to honor a long time FOSS advocate and activist as well as APC member, Chris Nicol who met an untimely death in the year 2005. The prize is awarded to individual or group doing outstanding works in making FOSS accessible to ordinary endusers.
Earlier in August this year, the names of seven finalists had been shortlisted among which NepaLinux was one of them. MPP has been developing NepaLinux since the year 2004, through the support of the PAN Localization Project, with an aim to provide free, easy and appropriate access to computers to the English nonproficient masses of Nepal by developing the localized operating systems along with software applications in Nepali. Already three different versions of NepaLinux, respectively 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 have been released by MPP. Currently works are underway for NepaLinux 3.0 to be released sometimes in March 2008. With every release, the NepaLinux Team have been trying to make the system as less technical and as much userfriendly as possible. NepaLinux is being planned to deploy in some 30 rural schools and 5 telecenters of Nepal. As a pilot project, it has already been deployed in three remote schools and the results have been very encouraging. “The winning of the prize has proved the acceptance and recognition of our works internationally as well. It will further motivate the team in carrying out further research and development to realize our objectives of making computers more accessible to the larger Nepali population who have been deprived so far”, says the director of MPP, Mr. Amar Gurung.