Every industry eventually matures. One of the great areas of maturation is in the focus that has been given over the past decade to make it possible for anyone anywhere to use a computer. It has not always been that way. In fact, not so long ago, it was common for software to be written for exclusive use in the country of origin.

Of all the effort that has been brought to bear on providing native language support for all computer users, the efforts of the Openi18n organization is deserving of special mention.

Samba-2.x supported a single locale through a mechanism called codepages . Samba-3 is destined to become a truly transglobal file- and printer-sharing platform.