License files - L10n

[Chris Leonard]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 7:08 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at 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-translators at 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