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Sonia Gandhi has launched the latest stage of the Indian government's large-scale open source initiative

Following the popularity of CDs containing Tamil Language versions of open source software, the Indian government is giving away millions of Hindi Language CDs.

Last month, ZDNet UK reported that the Indian government would distribute 3.5m free CDs containing Tamil Language versions of open source applications, including the Firefox browser and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite. Within a month the project had received requests for 85,000 CDs, thousands of downloads from its Web site, and had attracted the attention of the President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam.

This week the government started distributing CDs in Hindi, according to R.K.V.S. Raman, a researcher at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an organisation involved in the production of the CD. The initiative has been funded by the Indian government, which hopes to encourage the use of computers. It plans to distribute 3.5 million copies of the Hindi Language CDs.

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ZD Net UK article

And if you haven't yet tried Open Office yourself yet you can download it from:

Open Office.org

Its available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Unix and in about 30 different language versions...and of course its free!