The most regular followers of GNU/Linux Matters‘ work will have noticed that publicly-visible activity has almost stalled over the month of October. There are important matters which keep us occupied behind the curtains.

As any activist or voluntary worker will surely know, one does not always have the resources to keep working at no cost forever. Of GLM’s two project leaders, one is combining non-profit work with international studies, and the other will formally leave the organization altogether within a handful of weeks, for personal and professional reasons.

This does not mean that GLM is shutting down tomorrow morning. First of all, development of our linking platform is well and progressing, and the translation community is still present and active. Secondly, we still have financial resources to keep the servers running for a comfortable amount of time.

We are, however, looking to pass the legal ownership of the websites over to another organization. This would not only free the only one of us living in France where the non-profit is legally registered, but most importantly, give the new eventual project leaders the full freedom and means to develop the project in the direction of their choice.

In the immediate weeks, we will likely be shutting down our advertizing service, nonbreakingspace, which has not contributed to the organization’s funding in a satisfactory way. Another suspended project is the T-shirt shop, this time purely due to lack of time. But in the meanwhile, all servers and development services remain up and running.

Again, this is neither an upcoming downtime notice, nor (yet) a formal goodbye. We are interested in any proposals from existing formal non-profit organizations who would be interested in taking over the project. You can contact us at committee at our domain name – we kindly ask for your understanding that we have extremely scarce time resources.

Thank you very much, and we shall keep everyone updated on how the situation evolves.

Olivier,
on behalf of the GNU/Linux Matters team.

The event will also see the announcement of the laureates of the Lutèce d’Or awards, in which we hope to qualify as the best project for promoting free software.

We won’t be giving a talk this time, but we’ll be very busy staffing the booth and looking for corporate sponsors. Our new T-shirt is already in the making, the printing shop reported, and should make its debut at the Paris event.

We’d be delighted to meet and talk to anyone who passes by (the entrance is costless, but registration is required). Particiipants and translators, if you happen to be there, please stop by and we’ll get you a drink!

(The video is a 26 MB Ogg file, viewable with VLC or any other decent video player.)

Given the hurried pace, the continuously moving camera, some disarming questions, and the speaker who consistently mis-pronounced every name he could read, it wasn’t such a bad performance after all. We’ll try hard to be interviewed in English, next time.

The first reason is obviously that we grow in our capacity to reach out to everyday users and provide them with prime-quality web material about GNU/Linux and freedomware.
More specifically, we are able to enter a part of the web where information about the free software world is relatively scarce. We hope to be all the more effective in fostering Linux usage in these languages.

Another great reason to rejoice is that this release marks the completion of our translation system. From the first words down to the last localized URL, these four websites have been translated, built, checked, and published with a web browser only. The ease and maturity of the process —even right-to-left languages are displayed faultessly, as honalinux.org testifies— makes us proud.

The translations are a trimmed edition of GetGNULinux.org, containing less pages and thus allowing an earlier release while the full edition is being translated. This method allows us to grow at a much faster pace and we shall be making use of it again soon. A few people deserve great credit for this release:

• Most of the credit for DungLinux.org goes to Clytie Siddall, from the Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team. Clytie, a familiar figure among internationalized free software project communities, simply stunned us with the efficiency and speed at which she worked through the translation. Many thanks also go to Minh Ngoc Le for his patient help and participation.
• The bulk of both OtrymayLinux.org and PereidinaLinux.org was built by V’yacheslav Stetskevych — who didn’t give up despite the fact that we (still) cannot differentiate written Russian from Ukraininan.
• Hassan Ibraheem took most of HonaLinux.org upon him, while we learned to write websites to suit his beautiful language (written and read from right to left!). A friendly wave also goes to Farid Fakhreddia for his encouragement and advice.

A press release (also translated in Russian, Vietnamese, Castilian (Spanish), and French) has been issued on this opportunity.

Mennecy, France (Sept 4, 2008) – The GNU/Linux Matters non-profit organization is extremely happy to release HonaLinux.org, PereidiNaLinux.org, DungLinux.org, and OtrymayLinux.org, four websites intended to become the homepage of the Linux operating system in Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese and Ukrainian.

By focusing on everyday users rather than software experts, the organization wishes to affect freedomware adoption at a wide scale. The websites feature concise, introductory information about the free operating system, favoring legibility over exhaustiveness.

The release of the four websites, which are translations of the English GetGNULinux.org, fits within the organization’s vision for a multilingual web advocacy movement. “We now have a mature, easy to use web translation system which will allow the rapid release of further translations”, said Gustavo Narea, General Secretary of the organization.

GNU/Linux Matters warmly invites community members of all languages to translate, improve, and link to its websites. “We are slowly making our way towards our objective of having one million Windows users go through our websites over one year”, expressed Olivier Cleynen, president of the non-profit. “With the coming of Animador, our web freedomware advocacy platform, participating should be even more enjoyable and exciting”, added Gustavo Narea.

The organization’s first step into the non-Western Internet was made possible thanks to the efforts of a few motivated participants from around the planet. With a small but growing community, and several additional projects about to be released, GNU/Linux Matters enthusiastically works its way to becoming the first web forefront for FLOSS communities.

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About GNU/Linux Matters:

A forefront actor of Internet marketing for software freedom, GNU/Linux Matters is a non-profit organization registered in France. Consisting of a small team of passionate members, it provides free software communities with high-quality, multi-lingual websites aimed at everyday computer users. Its main project, GetGNULinux.org (http://www.getgnulinux.org/), is focused on the Linux operating system.
Read more at http://www.gnulinuxmatters.org/

Contact:

Paris: Olivier Cleynen,     +33 (0)6 28 410 948     (French, English, German)
Madrid: Gustavo Narea,     +34 (0)6 29 247 034     (Spanish, English)
http://www.gnulinuxmatters.org/contact