Rosetta Legalese

[|| स्वक्ष]

On 8/2/05, Steve Alexander <steve at canonical.com> wrote:

Hello Steve :-)

Thanks for the clarification's...

> The fact that the source code to Rosetta is not available does not
> change the status of translations produced with the help of Rosetta.
> It is very rare that the tools you use have any effect on the status of
> the end product.

If so, then why has Rosetta not been accepted by Debian which has
chosen to go with Pootle instead. Without getting pedantic, is it not
in some way related to possible legal issues at some point.



> If you draw a picture using Adobe Photoshop, your picture does not
> belong to Adobe.  If you draw a picture using the Gimp, which is
> licensed under the GPL, you may license your picture any way you want to.

True, but this is not a separate, single independent unit and would be
a part of the big picture.



> > Since Rosetta is non GPL if Canonical decides to withdraw support or
> > if it changed their company license then what happens to that language
> > package ?
> 
> The language package is independent of Rosetta.  It is composed of
> standard PO files, and these can be maintained using text editors or
> specialized editors.  The advantage of using Rosetta is that it makes it
> easy for people to collaborate in translating software, and allows
> people to translate even when they are not software experts.

Does it mean any PO files be used with another translation software
which supports this format ?



 
> I've now checked this out.  Canonical will definitely be releasing the
> source code to Rosetta under an open source licence at some point in the
> future.  We do not yet know exactly when that will be.  Some parts of

I agree, the future does sound vague indeed !  Just wondering why
Ubuntu / Canonical, which has been doing so much good work, does not
want to release Rosetta under GPL (which is easy to implement) for
upstream (Debian) adoption ?  That is perplexing to say the least,
more so when a lot of *volunteers* are contributing and using Rosetta
for translation.



 
> Entire translations for an Ubuntu package can be downloaded from Rosetta
> as PO files, which is not a proprietary format.

Can anyone modify, add to the files too without permission from the
author or Canonical ?
 
-- 
cheers,
|| स्वक्ष || svaksha