Localisation initiatives and forking

In an interesting post at AsiaOSC, the admin quotes an article by Don Sambandaraksa on the 'forking' that has come to characterise the L10n initiatives. It is unfortunate that Don's original article is not archived. On a side note, perhaps this augments the argument that perhaps the article needed to be quoted in entirety.

The concept of Free/ Libre OpenSource Software based development models is 'giving back to the community'. Forking an original project leads to numerous problems of merging the main stream with the fork. Moreover, modifications made in either the main or the fork is hard enough to be passed back and forth. The article quotes the example of the Malayasian community effort to localise GNOME and states that

they have localized Gnome into the Malay language, and that has now been passed back to Gnome. That means, every country in the world who downloads Gnome in future, and all future Linux distributions that come with Gnome, will also have the option of the Malay language pack.

This has been the accepted norm with L10n efforts in general. I could, for example, take the case of the Bangla Localisation of GNOME. Currently the group is working simultaneously on KDE, GNOME 2.6 and as well as distribution specific RPMs. It has already released a LiveCD - the AnkurBangla LiveDesktop v1.0 (Technology Preview) based on GNOME 2.4. With that, work done so far has been passed back onto the main tree and so anyone using above GNOME 2.2 will get Bangla Support enabled. In fact Suse 9.0 perhaps has the same.

Forking adds the additional chance of making the fork so different that putting it back onto the mainstream breaks a lot of existing rules and parts of the toolchain.

Don Sambandaraksa argues, programmers should make every effort to work within the existing internationalization / localization efforts if they are customing software for their own country - assuming it is just localization work. Even if extra core functionality is required, local teams should still join the international project, rather than enhancing just a local version, he says. There is rarely a need for a fork, he claims.

- posted by sankarshan @ 1/18/2004 06:46:00 AM