[illumos-Discuss] [Discuss] IE? (Illumos En Español)

[Matt Lewandowsky]

Likewise, not everyone can speak English. (Sadly, this includes some people who claim it as their native tongue, but that's hopefully irrelevant here.)

So, how I see it is as follows: If the project doesn't accommodate non-English speakers, they'll either ignore the project and/or they may splinter off the radar. I've seen this happen with other open source projects, where there's a group of people speaking another language who have a superset (of sorts) of the main codebase, managed as a separate project as it had been decreed that all communication on the main project's lists must be in English. They inevitably end up forking or dying (with their enhancements never ending up in the upstream codebase, usually due to a form of NIH combined with the sheer size of the patchset), as they don't have any value as a separate project with simply locale-based changes.

It benefits no one, especially if it's a huge codebase like this. If they want an official mechanism to communicate in their native language, I say go for it. The only other fair solution is to make this list multilingual, which bring us back to your original complaint: you don't speak Spanish. ;) Do you want to be stuck reading multi-lingual posts here, do you want them to have an officially-sanctioned place to collaborate, or do you want to force them into a self-run state where they may be forced to create a derivative project?

While avoiding "every possible group gets at least one list", it's easy to fall into the trap at the other end of the spectrum: insufficient number of lists.

Just my US$0.02. (I know that it's worth less than ever, but humor me. :) )

--Matt Lewandowsky
Greenviolet



Sent from my HTC Touch Pro2 on the Now Network from Sprint®.

-----Original Message-----
From: Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de>
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 11:56
To: hsaltiel at gmail.com; garrett at nexenta.com
Cc: discuss at lists.illumos.org
Subject: Re: [illumos-Discuss] [Discuss] IE? (Illumos En Español)

Hernan Saltiel <hsaltiel at gmail.com> wrote:

 > Hi, Garrett!
 > As you can read in the previous emails, the Spanish speaking community is
 > very interested in having a mailing list in your site where to post doubts
 > and collaborate in our own language.
 > And maybe, of course, translate the site in the future ;-) .
 > Is there any chance to have this list in IllumOS.org, with a name like
 > "illumos-es" or "discuss-es", for example?

 I believe that having different "clubs" for different languages would separate
 the community.

 I don't speak spanish, so how would I know what has been discussed in a spanish
 mailing list?

 Jörg

 --
  EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
        js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni) 
        joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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