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On Sat, 2003-08-23 at 17:33, Bernard yap wrote:
> Colin Charles wrote:
> > From official quarters, we can't recognise a forked project and treat it
> > as "official". <snipped>
>
> 'official' or 'unofficial' isn't the point of my previous post. it's as simple
> as sticking a note near the end like, "there's currently no official malay
> localization for OOo, tho' bustamam has an unofficial malay localization fork
> for linux at $(URL), for those who are interested blah blah please contact the
> official OOo MarCon blah blah blah". isn't that better?
well, i didn't write it, and i think it was not a big feature piece on
OOo 1.1 either. its was merely targetted at selling cd's at FOSSCON
2003.
1.1 itself isn't released. hence the mention of 1.1 RC3.
if it is mentioned that there is an unofficial malay localization fork
for linux, we also need to mention the chinese (tw/cn) as well as the
indian (hn/tamil) - those are already 5 links by my counting, and the
OFFICIAL my.openoffice.org, would mean 6 links.
and for the last time, i'll repeat: bustamam has released a "patch". it
is NOT a precompiled distribution of sorts. people still have to
download the official OOo stuff.
> <non-flammable-material>
> mentioning the original author is a long-held tradition of the open
> source community, and the community has come a long way without
> "official", "unofficial" and all.
> </non-flammable-material>
if only we can recognise the fork. my saying there's a fork, what we're
saying is that there's no one-OOo. and that's bad. it creates FUD within
the corporate sector. and with SCO and the like, we don't want more FUD.
anyways, this is the last i'll be stating on this issue. i'm going back
to hacking on OOo 1.1 RC4, and fixing up some things in it now.
if you (or others) are unhappy, i suggest you hassle the folk in charge
to:
a) move the project off sf.net, to OOo's site (my.openoffice.org)
b) recognise that there *are* other languages that need to be used in
malaysia
c) recognise that not only Linux users want to use OOo that is localised
into BM
d) release a package, not a patch
"official" and "unofficial" means business, these days. names are
everything. its like selling a burnt, customised copy of redhat linux
that crashes. thats bad. its the same as telling folk to patch OOo, then
if it crashes, or does something bad, it is damaging to OOo's name. as
an open source enthusiast yourself bernard, i think you should
understand this. because it all boils down to supporting something.
kind regards.
--
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
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