Hello Charles, I am sorry for writing to you directly. Daniel Carrera adviced me to write to you regarding the small issue I am facing in the Georgian NL.
I am sorry for the long explanation. You may go to the ISSUE part directly. INTRODUCTION ============ As you might remember, I have been supporting the development of FOSS as well as other resources to Georgia since 1998. I have translated GNU-GPL to Georgian, coordinated the l10n and Georgian language support to some Linux distributions and open-source products (the majority of Georgian l10n projects I have been coordinating can be found at my Georgian l10n site: http://www.gakartuleba.org ). I have always believed in open and collaborative work and tried to encourage, motivate and get as many people interested in participating the projects, as possible. As I decided to start Georgian l10n and Native-Lang project of OpenOffice.org, I announced it on various Georgian forums, notified all the people that could be interested in participating the project or had had anything to do with l10n and asked all of them to participate in the project. We had an open meeting (some of the people from abroad even participated by Skype) and agreed on a plan to successfully localize the OOo to Georgian language, support its adaptation to Georgian schools and various governmential and non-governmential bodies, etc. As I have notified you in the IRC conf, the first step was to create a working and productive Georgian glossary of OOo terms (OOo being the first ever Office Suite to be localized in Georgian language), where all the Georgian IT experts and linguists, as well as OOo users could participate and create the quality glossary which we would feed to the Translation Memory and start the actual l10n of the modules. For that, I programmed an environment that enabled usrs to achieve this goals and published the OOo base glossary of terms. So far, we have sucessfully created the first version of the terms and the glossary should be finally approved within 2 weeks. I have also notified the Georgian press and media about the intention of our project and started negotiations with various groups, people, trying to convince the Ministry of Education of Georgia, as well as other bodies of the advantages it would bring for Georgia to have FOSS and OOo as the default system/platform. All the information regarding our project can be found on the website I mentioned above, as well as on various open Georgian forums and resources. During this period, I have also been encouraging the memebrs of various online communities, as well as schientists/linguists, to join our project (I am also going to try to have some students and professors from Georgia's Tbilisi State University join us). ISSUE ===== I am sorry for the long introduction. I will go straightnto the issue now: There is a person called Gia Shervashidze, who was one of the pioneers of IT users in Georgia (since late 80s). Hehas good experience in modifying earlier versions of MS Windows, creating some Georgian truetype fonts etc. He has provided support to many Georgian windows/dos users too. 9I have heard that he has earlier tried to unoficially localize/hack Windows 98 to support Georgian language, but his work has not been used by Georgian users, being unofficial, not not standards-compliant and unadvertisised. As I announced we were going to have a meeting regarding the l10n and NL project of OOo and other FOSS products, we also invited this person to attend the meeting, but he did not come. Of course, we published the results of hte meeting, as well as our plans ad current status of the projects on the websitye and various forums. After I had notofied you of our project and my intention to support the Georgian NL and l10n, after the meeting was long over, I had programmed the glossary management interface and we had started working on the glossary and other tasks, on 24 Feb 2005, Gia Shervashidze mysteriously reappeared (without notifyingus of anything, nor having participated in any forum) and announced at [email protected] that he, along his newly-founded NGO "were going to localize OOo" in Georgian. Of course, I have directly replied to him, notifying him of our existing project and current status, and asked him to subscribe to our mailing list, join our project and introduce the memebrs of his team. To make the long story short, I have repeatedly asked him to join the project, subscribe to the list and join the project, which so he has been refusing. He has also refused to answer my last correspodence. I have also asked him about the memebrs of his team (being part of l10n projects for some years, I know almost any Georgian user who has had anything to do with FOSS and l10n, which unfortunately are not many), as perhaps I could talk to them and explain the importance of open and collaborative work, but he has also refused to disclose the memebers of his team (if there are any) and the status of his work. Today, he appeared on [email protected] and ignoring the existing Georgian NL project, announced his proposal for 'creating' the Georgian NL. As I would not like to loose any member who could be of any use to the OOo project, I do not know how to act in this case, as the person has been ignoring our work so far and refusing to cooperate in any way. In my correspondence to him, I have always remained polite and tried to explain the neccessity of open principles and the need of cooperation, though in vain. I would very much appreciate your advice and help on the issue and apologize again for the very long explanatory mail. I will be CC'ing this letter to Daniel Carrera. Best regards, Aiet Kolkhi --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
