African but only in name

There is a new (for me) CMS system called Joomla. Joomla is a phonetic spelling for a Swahili word.

I thought, how cool, at last a world class Free Software project by Swahili speaking Africans.

However, I checked the biographies of the project participants. Turns out that all of them come from developed countries. Africa’s contribution is limited, in this case, to a relatively unfamiliar language, which provides cool names for projects.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.