Saturday, August 2, 2008

OpenAFS for Windows with Unicode is Available

A couple of weeks ago OpenAFS for Windows with Unicode path name support was released.  I thought this was going to be a big deal.  Due to the lack of Unicode support there were all sorts of problems for organizations that wanted to use roaming profiles and redirected folders.  Even more important is the fact that the vast majority of the world does not limit their writing to the characters represented in Windows OEM Code Pages 437 and 850.   For years these individuals could not save their data into AFS using the language of their choice.  

Up to this point, 1.5.5x has had one of the slowest adoption rates of any OpenAFS for Windows release over the last five years.  Is this because it is Summer?  Is it because most users are Americans and they do not require Unicode?  Is it because everyone has given up on AFS?  I don't know.

What I do know is that the Unicode version has been downloaded (in small numbers) by a broad range of top-level domains other than the United States including Malaysia, Russia, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, Brazil, Hong Kong, Poland, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Japan, and Indonesia.  Hopefully, users from these countries will write in to describe how Unicode support has made their lives easier.