An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Jan Claeys]

Op donderdag 24-05-2007 om 00:00 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Matthew
Garrett:
> On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 10:40:08PM +0200, Jan Claeys wrote:
> 
> > Like I said on that blog post, another meaning of the word rape (and
> > actually the *original* meaning, as derived from Latin), and of the
> > Dutch translation of it (the author is Dutch), has nothing specifically
> > to do with sexual harassment.  Even if it's mostly used in the last
> > meaning these days (especially in popular media & daily speech), there
> > is no reason for the Ubuntu project to try to change the English
> > language and extinguish the original _unoffensive_ meaning completely by
> > marking the word as "might possibly be interpreted as offensive by
> > someone".
> 
> And, like I said, that's not how it's going to be interpreted in 
> English. It's not Ubuntu that's trying to alter the English language - 
> it's the people using it. And, yes, language changes over time.

I knew the other meaning from reading both old and new English texts
(including books & journalism), so it's still in use, though maybe not
everywhere or by everyone and not much...  But let's leave this specific
example aside (I love discussions about language too much ;) ).


> That's not the case on public mailing lists, it's not 
> the case on public IRC channels and it's not the case on sites like 
> Planet. Anyone contributing to any of these needs to be very aware of 
> how their use of language may cause offense.

Well, almost everything may cause offense to someone.  For example
someone on a minibus I drive for my job got upset this morning because
somebody else told about a grandfather dying of cancer.  Or see the
"FLOSS" example below.  And those are probably not the most unthought of
ones.

And not writing anything would make the planet a bit empty.   ;-)


> > BTW: It seems like some people in Asia consider the term "FLOSS" to
> > bring bad luck, who's going to remove the more than 1000 occurrences of
> > that from ubuntu.com, so that we don't offend those Asian people
> > anymore?  (Please don't!)
> 
> The fact that something in English is offensive if moved directly into a 
> foreign language isn't a good argument for changing it. On the other 
> hand, if it's offensive and we're including it directly in foreign 
> translations, then we probably need to reconsider that.

The reason is because of the English meaning, or more precisely the
"loss" part in it, and thus it only affects those who actually
understand & read English: <http://www.amyjiangsu.com/?p=34>
(Amy is on the Ubuntu planet btw...)


-- 
Jan Claeys