Planning Council,
Here are the results of our call on Friday regarding translating Europa
and a translations project in general. Attending were: Rich Gronback,
Jess Garms, Wenfeng Li, Patt Huff, David Williams, John Graham,
Masoyuki Jwanaga, Doug Schaefer, Doug Gaff, Mike Milinkovich and at
least one other person whose name I did not catch.
The advance goal of this call was that, having received the size
estimates of the translation effort for the various projects over the
previous week, we were going to report back on our conversations with
our collective employers about whether they were willing to put
resources into translating Europa and/or a translation project that
will help the community translate Europa and future simultaneous
releases.
This goal was only met in the negative: Doug and Doug stated that Wind
River and QNX were not planning to provide resources to translate/a
translations project. Doug Gaff said that he would ask around, but did
not expect a positive reply. Everyone else (with three exceptions
below) remained silent - unfortunately, silence implies the negative
and thus everyone (with three exceptions below) has stated that their
companies are not going to provide resources.
The three exceptions are: BEA, Actuate, and IBM. These three are having
a conference call next week and will report back to this list. It
remains uncertain at this time whether these three companies will
volunteer the resources necessary to do either the translations or the
translations project, but at least they are continuing the
conversation. It was _very_ clear that none of these three was willing
to do the work on their own - the question only remains whether they
are willing to share the work without further help from other Eclipse
members.
John Graham also suggested that someone might find a third-party
company to do the work, get a bid, and then the EMO could ask around if
the member companies are willing to co-fund the contract. We had no
volunteers to do that initial "find a third-party company" step.
Mike explained that we should be very, very clear about the situation:
- Non-English-speaking countries are the fastest areas of growth in
Eclipse downloads.
- Non-English-speaking countries already account for more than 35%
of the downloads.
- There will NOT BE any translations of Europa projects if we do
not have a translations effort/project.
- Someone needs to step up and lead this project or it's not going
to happen. Period.
Notes taken and posted by Bjorn
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