Parlen del CD-ROM...
-- Jes�s Corrius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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=============================Issue n° 01 April 2004
Welcome to the Native-Lang Newsletter!
This newletter will keep you updated on what's going on inside the Native-Lang Confederation of OpenOffice.org
We'll try to collect every piece of interesting news inside the Native-Lang projects, at the level of the Confederation and we'll also provide some insights on
localizations, marketing, development, etc...
As this is our first issue, we will cover not only what happened in April but also what has been going on some time before.
1.*New Native-Lang Projects to be created*
- Two new Native-Lang Projects are on their way to be created: The Azeri Project led by Emin Huseynov is at this moment in his pre-set up phase.
Emin wanted to start the Localization effort first, but insisted on providing his community a meeting place here on OpenOffice.org. The domain name hasn't been set up yet (no JCA nor ssh keys submitted). However Charles-H. Schulz has spent some times helping out Emin off list and asked Rail Aliev and Görkem Cetin from the Russian and Turkish Project to bring Emin and his community on the right track.
- Ukrainian Native-Lang Project proposal accepted: Led by Mr Vad V. Mashckoff (Adiel), backed by the Alt Linux Community and OSDN Ukraine, the project will soon start. The Localization effort however is being undertaken by Sergyi Kudryk and will remain a separate initiative on SourceForge.
2.*Talk-shows & Politics*
- After two months of off list work involving discussions with many native-lang leads, Charles-H. Schulz comes up with what he believes will be the "Next Big Thing" © for the Native-Lang Confederation.
- Proposal for the Directorates for the Native-Lang Confederation posted and voted on; despite a big majority in favor of the reform Charles-H. Schulz halted the process in order to propose a set of ideas to be implemented that would acknowledge and prevent possible risks of failure.
- Software Patents not welcomed at all: the Homepage of OpenOffice.org and many native-lang projects as well have displayed their solidarity agains the Software Patents in the European Union. Simon Brouwer, lead of the Dutch (nl) native-lang community launched the momentum and got many followers.
- Native-Lang Confederation Guidelines revised and augmented by Charles-H. Schulz: new policies on projects'setup and creation processes and dispute settlement policies inside the native-lang projects.
3.*Localizations*
- Ainu Localization effort started: Despite some cultural issues making the translation of technical terms difficult, the Ainu people will get OpenOffice.org in their own language; HiranoKazunari, one of the lead of the Japanese Native-lang Project works on it with several other volunteers. Louis proposed to interview the Ainu team.
- Pavel Janik has extracted the Readme files of the upcoming 1.1.2 in order to allow the native-lang projects to translate them and hence provide 100% translated builds in every available language.
- Many localized 1.1.1 builds released: Prague gets multilingual: French, German, Danish, Turkish, Japanese, Italian and many more available for download.
4.*Development & Software*
- OOVirg, FontOO, OOConv get translated in several languages: after having included OOVirg in the OOo software suite, the add-ons family from the Native-Lang projects are getting a widespread use thanks to their translations in several languages. Last to date but not least, OOConv has been translated in Hungarian. Congratulations to their authors and translators!
5.*Marketing & Communication*
- Largest marketing action for OOo and FLOSS takes place in Catalunya: 25th of April 2004: quoted from Jesus Corrius, lead of the Catalan Native-Lang Project:
"One of the biggest newspapers in Spain, el
Periodico de Catalunya[1] is going to give away for free a copy of a
CD-ROM that we at Softcatalà put together with software localised into
Catalan. The Catalan government is paying the cost of producing the
copies of the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM includes OpenOffice.org 1.1, Abiword,
Mozilla, FireFox, and other free software tools and documents localised
into Catalan by the people arround the Softcatalà community. Windows and
GNU/Linux versions are included. [....] The newspaper has produced 310.000 copies of the CD-ROMThis is the large action never done in Catalonia to distribute free software to end-users."
- Several leads, such as Marko Gronroos (fi) and Davide Dozza (it) expressed the idea to have another web site for marketing and users' support purposes. Albeit the discussion got stopped somewhere, the idea is already implemented in some sense through the many different sites and portals about OOo in specific languages and countries. CollabNet is not that easy to use, after all....
- German Poster Contest for OpenOffice.org: congratulations to the winners!
- Mascot Competition for OOo won by Andrea Maggioni. Thanks to Ian Lynch for this contest that was made possible by the OOEdu initiative.
- Live from Japan: The OpenOffice.org's Official Users Guide will be available on the 23rd of April in the bookstores of Japan, thanks to the members of the Japanese Native-Lang Project.
6.*Other news items*
- Native-Lang Homepage re-drafted: Charles-H. Schulz collected all the ideas and suggestions to refresh the aging native-lang homepage and draft a new one; minor modifications remain to be done in order to upload it.
by Charles-H. Schulz,
with the help of Sophie Gautier and
Jacqueline McNally.
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