Query results: July, 2007

We’re very happy to announce the completion of the Croatian translation of 3dollarsoftware.org.

This one-page site provides a short explanation of the dangers and incoherences of using proprietary software to help development and education.

The translation was born out of the efforts of Danijel Orsolic, head of the Libervis Network, and all our thanks go to him for that.

We took the opportunity to improve the code of the site slightly, so that it now also displays correctly in browsers which don’t follow web standards.

We have plenty of link buttons, but none yet that we can use as a nice banner of standard size. This has been requested several times, especially by the Spanish-speaking GNU/Linux community. So if anyone has a proposal, please make yourself known… We’re looking for something simple, understandable by anyone (geek humor prohibited!), and if possible that would insist on freedom.

This is also the opportunity to present our latest “liberated by GNU/Linux” button, a derivative of the Ubuntu version created by Pavel Rojtberg who licensed his work under a CC by-nc-sa license. If you can translate the text to Spanish (Castillian) or Catalan, please leave a note down here, so that we can publish it under these languages as well.

EDIT:

The French and the German versions of the new button have been added. The source file of the button is available together with the other button files on the button page.

I am conducting a thorough clean-up of the various “modules” that we have been using or experimenting with over the last few months. There are minor changes, like the deletion of the “community.getgnulinux.org” small portal page; other changes are more significant.

In particular, we had been using both a project manager and a “development wiki”, which slowly went deprecated. I believe there are simply not enough of us involved with the non-profit larger scale issues to justify using one of these. Instead, within the coming week, we will install a bug tracker (most likely trac), which will be simpler and more accessible.

Also, I have been starting to extract the translated content from the translation wikis.
There are currently eleven (!) translations with various completion levels, and most of them have slowed down quickly after start. Managing many different languages is very challenging - and we have two problems. The first is building real translation teams and keeping them motivated; this will likely be our focus in September. The second is how to keep the information flowing both ways (updates to the English site and progress of translations) efficiently.
So far the translation wikis have not been very adapted in this respect. So, so long as a DocBook-or-other infrastructure isn’t set-up, the current translation wikis will be migrated to SVN repositories. These repositories will only contain easy-to-edit text files.

This is all part of an effort to have a better overview of where we stand. We have made significant efforts to find funds for GNU/Linux Matters in the last weeks (more information will follow) and there will be very important decisions to make soon. We want to be ready by then ;- )