SOFTWARE LIKE KIWIX OFFLINE
As far as I remember, I did not have strong global thoughts about poverty, the digital divide, and censorship at that time.įun fact: Renaud, the co-founder of Kiwix, had pretty different reasons to start a Wikipedia offline project. A few projects had already failed to bring Wikipedia on CD/DVD, and I thought could be something useful and doable.
SOFTWARE LIKE KIWIX SOFTWARE
software programming.Īt that time in France, broadband access was not, in particular in the countryside, where I'm from. After a few years, it became clear to me that the project had become sustainable, and I started to wonder if I could do something more valuable for it using my core skills, i.e. This is what knowledge and education are for.ĭW: Why were you interested in offline content in an age of broadband? Why did you launch the Kiwix project?ĮE: I first joined the Wikimedia movement as a regular editor. To achieve this, most of them need first to emancipate themselves from external and cultural powers. Why is that so?ĮE: Each human should be concretely free to choose his own path in life. I then switched to Debian and later to Ubuntu.ĭW: I read that you consider access to information a basic human right, much like access to water. A few months later, I was presented with GNU/Linux.
Most of the workstations at my university had NetBSD. I was lucky to have a few mentors and friends to lead me in programming before the university, but not lucky enough to get introduced to FOSS. I started to deal with free and open source software (FOSS) at the University, fairly late compared to others. We talked about how the project got started and what lies ahead our interview has been lightly edited for clarity.ĭon Watkins: How did you get started in open source?Įmmanuel Engelhart: I'm a French software engineer I studied in Paris but have been working mostly in Germany and Switzerland as a freelancer. I had the opportunity to speak with Emmanuel Engelhart, who, with Renaud Gaudin, developed Kiwix and released it in 2007. In Kiwix's words: "Kiwix is an offline solution that allows you to access educational content like Wikipedia, the Wiktionary, TED talks, and many others on any computer or smartphone-without the need for a live internet connection." An integral piece of the project is Kiwix, which brings the richness of web content to areas of the world not served by broadband. Recently I wrote about Internet-in-a-Box, an educational computer that provides offline access to a wealth of content, including Wikipedia, for students, teachers, and others who don't have reliable internet access.
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