License files - L10n
All, I'm hoping to close a ticket in the OLPC Trac, and I wanted to float my proposed solution past the group. This ticket http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8043 Suggests providing translated versions of the licenses. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8043#comment:4 http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8043#comment:6 My answer is that we can't *replace* license files with translated versions as only Englsih is official and we shouldn't add to theworkload and confusion by adding unofficial versions anyway, but we can point people to the home of unofficial translated versions on an official site. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html Does that sound like a reasonable compromise under the circumstances? I realize anything having to do with licenses is likely to promote a firestorm, whcih is not my intent. I also realize that any decision on modifying license files needs to be taken by suitable management-level people on behalf of their projects. I'm just hoping to close a simple ticket here and this is the easiest and most correct solution I could devise. cjl ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: License files - L10n
The theory was to provide, in flash, the unofficial license translations in the languages primarily used in deployments, e.g. Spanish. That way the kids can actually tell what rights they have without having to (1) learn English, or (2) access a perhaps nonexistent or very slow Internet connection. Providing the English language license is a requirement of the licenses themselves; if you ship the software, you must provide them. Providing the unofficial translations is not a requirement of the licenses. But how can you teach kids the principles of free software without them ever being able to read how they can apply those principles in their own life with the software right in front of them? (Indeed some of the deployments appear to have never read nor understood the licenses -- or to just be corrupt -- since they violate the TiVoization clause. Having locally readable licenses may help fix that, too.) The license translations are tiny -- a couple of kbytes each -- so flash space isn't a big issue. I'm just hoping to close a simple ticket here and this is the easiest and most correct solution I could devise. Easiest, certainly. Most correct, no. John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: License files - L10n
(repost from trac) -1, simple is the enemy of the good. We must not replace the English version of the GPL and LGPL licenses, since these are the forms in which the licenses are granted. We must continue to display these. We should provide translation of all user-displayed strings in what we ship. Since we can't not-ship the licenses, we have to consider them. We should include translations of the interactive notices: program Copyright (C) year name of author This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details. We should include translations of the licenses. There are translations available. Where a translation is not available, a new one should be created. We should translate as much as we can, as best we can, and be prepared to correct the translations. The translations we ship should explicitly deny that they replace the English license. Since there is already an upstream translation effort, it should be engaged. It can surely help. For presentation, I'd like to see: * the English notice side by side with the translated notice, at Sugar startup, (find out from the Sugar Labs Design Team how they would like to do this), * the English license side by side with the translated license, in the * My Settings - About my Computer. Currently, we have a translated notice, and an untranslated license. This is adequate, but not good. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: License files - L10n
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 7:08 PM, John Gilmore g...@toad.com wrote: The theory was to provide, in flash, the unofficial license translations in the languages primarily used in deployments, e.g. Spanish. That way the kids can actually tell what rights they have without having to (1) learn English, or (2) access a perhaps nonexistent or very slow Internet connection. Providing the English language license is a requirement of the licenses themselves; if you ship the software, you must provide them. Providing the unofficial translations is not a requirement of the licenses. But how can you teach kids the principles of free software without them ever being able to read how they can apply those principles in their own life with the software right in front of them? To be clear, that theory is not described in ticket #8043 or on it's predecessors #6928 and #4265 which clearly focus on the need for compliance and not on the educational content opportunity. As the person who proposed http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/032457.html and followed through on http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2011-July/032539.html bundling the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in multiple languages (~ 100 in the LatAmCarib bundle), I can certainly appreciate the pedagogic value of translations of a document enshrining the freedoms expressed in the FSF licenses. However, that was in no way expressed as the purpose of this or previous tickets. As I said on the ticket #8043 (in the case that it was desired to provide translations): Please provide links to the English texts that you want posted in Pootle if you still want to pursue this approach. I'm just hoping to close a simple ticket here and this is the easiest and most correct solution I could devise. Easiest, certainly. Most correct, no. Most correct in the compliance sense expressed in the tickets, perhaps not in the educational sense of the revised theory you are now propounding, for which I have some sympathy. Please provide the necessary links to the license texts of interest on the ticket and I will use the txt2po function of the Translate Toolkit to convert them into PO files to be hosted on our Pootle instance, which can be sent upstream upon completion for review to web-translat...@gnu.org. Unfortunately, only the GFDLv1.3 is currently available in Spanish, and the only language(s) of the GPLv3 relevant to a deployment that I know of are Armenian (and perhaps French). Perhaps with time we can improve on that coverage the way we have tried to reach out to other upstream and downstream efforts and providing Pootle hosting (AbiWord / Gnash / Waveplace) or links and tracking (Gnome / Fedora / Translation Project). I await inclusion of the relevant relevant links on the ticket and I will process the texts for posting on Pootle. What OLPC or Sugar Labs or gnu.org does with them then is a policy question for each to determine for themselves and one that will remain a moot point until relevant translations are performed. cjl ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
