Rosetta legal questions

Hello Barry!
It's been a long time since we last "met" on the Internet :)

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 03:08:16PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> I am the project leader for GNU Mailman and I am exploring the
> possibility of using Rosetta to manage our translations.  Mailman 2.1 is
> translated to over 2 dozen languages, but management of that effort is
> not as efficient as it could be.  I've learned about Rosetta and while I
> haven't used it, it looks like a great tool for managing our
> translations.  In fact, Mailman is already registered, so that's a good
> start!

Thanks for the interest. I every now and then think about mailman
translations, due to the awful state of Catalan and my lack of time to
do anything about it :)

> My biggest question relates to how copyright on translations submitted
> through Rosetta are handled.  Mailman being a GNU project has to adhere
> to certain guidelines, both for the copyright applied to translation
> submissions, and to legal permission given by translators.  For example,
> at a minimum translations must be released under a license compatible
> with the GPL for us to accept them.  Also, because Mailman 2.1 is a GNU
> project, the FSF requires us to obtain copyright assignments or
> disclaimers, although I think we might have some leeway here.
> 
> How would these requirements work within the context of Rosetta?  Do
> translators have to sign any kind of agreement, or release their
> translations under any particular license?  Or can translations be
> uploaded with no pre-arranged agreement?  How do other projects handle
> copyright issues under Rosetta?

Ok, so by parts:

Translations made in Rosetta are released under the same licence as the
upstream code, so your translations would be under the GPL.

Rosetta doesn't provide any interface to handle the signing of
translation disclaimers, but I have an idea of what we can do:

We can create a GNU Translators group, and assign mailman and any other
GNU packages that choose to use Rosetta in the future. Only people that
have translation disclaimers sent to the FSF would be able to join these
teams, and in consequence translate Mailman. See the "legal" link in
Rosetta for the exact terms.

I see another problem, which might have been solved since I last looked
at mailman translations. Two years ago or so, we had two different kind
of files to translate: 1) the po files for the strings in the python
code, and 2) the email templates mailman sends in many situations.

As Rosetta only handles PO files, we'd need to find a way to convert the
text templates to gettext format prior to their import, and another way
to get them back to normal format.

It shouldn't be too difficult to get this done, if isn't already. Maybe
po4a has something that can help.  Even if you didn't use Rosetta, I'm
sure many translators would be _glad_ to see all the translatable stuff
in po files only, and not arbitrary extra formats :)

Many thanks for your interest, Barry.
I will be glad to see mailman jump into Rosetta!

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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