Rosetta legal questions

Hello,

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 05:50:55PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> > Thanks for the interest. I every now and then think about mailman
> > translations, due to the awful state of Catalan and my lack of time to
> > do anything about it :)
> 
> Trust me, I know how that goes.  One of my goals for the rest of the
> year is to improve Mailman's project management so more people can
> contribute.  Rosetta seems like a good way to get more people involved
> in the translation efforts, so it's not so dependent on one person's
> level of availability.

That's good, back when I was in the mailing list it already appeared
mailman 2.1.0 depended on you entirely, for code, docs and handling of
translations. I guess that was time consuming.

> > Translations made in Rosetta are released under the same licence as the
> > upstream code, so your translations would be under the GPL.
> 
> Great!
> 
> > Rosetta doesn't provide any interface to handle the signing of
> > translation disclaimers, but I have an idea of what we can do:
> > 
> > We can create a GNU Translators group, and assign mailman and any other
> > GNU packages that choose to use Rosetta in the future. Only people that
> > have translation disclaimers sent to the FSF would be able to join these
> > teams, and in consequence translate Mailman. See the "legal" link in
> > Rosetta for the exact terms.

(hmm, that last sentence was supossed to be two paragraphs above. Please
bear with me :P)

> This sounds like a great idea.  The nice thing is that people could sign
> a blanket disclaimer, which would help not just Mailman, but all GNU
> projects.

Yes, that's what they are currently doing right now. In the description
for the GNU team, we can add the what and why about the translation
disclaimer, and a link to the TP for the template people have to send by
snail mail.

> > I see another problem, which might have been solved since I last looked
> > at mailman translations. Two years ago or so, we had two different kind
> > of files to translate: 1) the po files for the strings in the python
> > code, and 2) the email templates mailman sends in many situations.
> > 
> > As Rosetta only handles PO files, we'd need to find a way to convert the
> > text templates to gettext format prior to their import, and another way
> > to get them back to normal format.
> 
> You make a good point, and unfortunately, that's still the case with
> Mailman 2.1.  I don't know that we can change that until Mailman 2.2 at
> the very least, although it's a very important goal for Mailman 3.


> > It shouldn't be too difficult to get this done, if isn't already. Maybe
> > po4a has something that can help.  Even if you didn't use Rosetta, I'm
> > sure many translators would be _glad_ to see all the translatable stuff
> > in po files only, and not arbitrary extra formats :)
> 
> Oh trust me, I would too!  It's a source of bugs that we don't have one
> set of templates for all languages, with the translatable parts living
> in po files.  I'll bring that up on the mailman-i18n mailing list --
> maybe someone has a good idea for helping with that.
> 
> I'd never heard of po4a before, but I did a quick search and found the
> pages for it.  I don't know whether it will help us, but I'd be happy to
> use it if it could.

If it's doable to make a conversion script now, I would give it a go. It
would really simplify things. Right now, we can only import the po
files, so an important part of mailman would be outside of Rosetta, and
this is quite suboptimal.

For other list readers, the format of the files we're talking about is
something like
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mailman/mailman/templates/en/invite.txt?view=markup

If you think you want to go ahead and start using Rosetta for the
current data that is in po files, we can do it now. Once we have the
others in po format, we'll be able to add them as well, under another
translation domain.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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