Hi Tristan: I'm writing you as the Coordinator of the Government of Galicia's Free Software Reference and Services Center, after receiving a bunch of angry messages against your hard comments on the support of Galician language in Firefox 3:
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internet/Mozilla/democracia/meritocracia/elpeputec/20080520elpepunet_4/Tes With your comments on the press, you are sugesting that: Galician localization community does not want/ it is not capable of having Firefox in galician language. Happily, that is not true. Unfortunately, people here is feeling like beeing under an attack from the Mozilla Foundation. We have a strong localization community here at Galiza. They were providing localized software to our own language since 1996 in both a volunteer and professional way. Since 2005 they even acquired the support of the Galician Government in their effort, managing to localize a large variety of projects from entire desktops like GNOME, office software like OpenOffice.org or more specific software like Typo3 or OpenBravo. Just as a show of the interest of the galician society, we registered at Mancomún more than 100.000 downloads and more than 30.000 distributed CD and DVD of free software localized to galician language in the last year. You can reach some of that software here: http://peme.mancomun.org/ Having Firefox localized to galician language by volunteers will be a nice thing, but it will not be possible if the Mozilla Foundation continues putting the blame on the Galician localization community... when you are rejecting their contributions same time. You might understand that attacking and damaging people is not a good way to motivate them, even when working with a so motivated community as the galician one. If this public Center can help to solve that disfunctional situation in order to have Firefox 3 available in Galician language, simply tell us and we will try to manage. Anyway: you might consideer that we will not do anything in the field of Free Software against the will of the Galician localization community. Attacking them will definitely not help. Greetings, -- Xesús Manuel Benítez Baleato Coordenador de mancomun.org Consellaría de Innovación e Industria Xunta de Galicia Praza de Europa, nº 15 - A, 6ºC 15707 Santiago de Compostela (Galiza) (0034) 638035310 Ext: 343820/ Fax: 881999113 <suso.baleato @ xunta.es>