Lost in translation (Ubuntu and Launchpad translations)

[Ville-Pekka Vainio]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> Do you think this is an issue? Why?

I definitely do. This is one example of Ubuntu not being as upstream oriented 
as a lot of the other distributions like Fedora are.

Launchpad itself is also closed source and it seems there are no plans of open 
sourcing it. In Fedora, the whole infrastructure, including Transifex, is 
completely open source. Of course the Canonical people have the right to 
choose their license, but I see Launchpad translations as a way of trying to 
get short term competitive advantage and not caring about the long term good 
of the whole open source ecosystem.

Ubuntu talks a lot about humanity and community, but it seems they only care 
about these things when it comes to their own "clique" of people, not the 
greater community of open source users and contributors. They also talk a lot 
about open source, but then they're not willing to "eat their own dogfood".

I'm one of the maintainers of Finnish translations for some of the 
applications that Fedora is upstream and Ubuntu is downstream for, like 
system-config-printer. I have stopped caring about Launchpad completely. I 
can't be bothered to go there looking for new translations or changes. If a 
patch gets sent to me and it looks good, I will gladly apply it, but I won't 
go hunting for things.

> How is translation in Fedora handling translation and upstream?

Upstream. I did some translations for gnome-packagekit and policykit-gnome, 
which I sent directly to the upstream Gnome L10n maintainers. I've also done 
the same for KDE. That's the Fedora way, as far as I can see.

(At the end of my rant, I do want to thank the Finnish Gnome translation team, 
though. I know a lot of them are Ubuntu users, but they get the open source 
idea and commit their changes to the upstream Gnome repository as well. Maybe 
this is something you should talk about with the Gnome team of your 
language.)


-- 
Ville-Pekka Vainio