On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:42 AM, Ross Gardler <rgard...@opendirective.com> wrote: > On 12 September 2011 10:27, Ian Lynch <ianrly...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 11 September 2011 23:19, Ross Gardler <rgard...@opendirective.com> wrote: >> >>> With my mentor hat on I have no objection as long as it is clear that no >>> decisions about the project in general can be made on this list. All >>> decisions must be made here. >>> >> >> Hi Ross, just to clarify what you mean by project in general. I assume you >> mean things like direction of the code development and intellectual >> property, rather than things like language translations, localisation and >> marketing? > > Yes, that is correct. > >> So eg they could make a decision to have a marketing conference >> in Japan or to correct say a translation error in a dictionary. In the >> latter case it would still require a committer to commit and have accepted >> the revision submitted to the main project. I'm just trying to understand >> the scope to the types of restrictions that are likely to apply. > > There is no fixed rule here. In practice no other ASF project has a > "dev" list in any language other than English as the accepted > guideline is that only English is allowed. Personally I don't think > this is workable in OOo. > > What we need to do is, as you say "understand the scope to the types > of restrictions that are likely to apply". As a starting point I would > say that if a decision on the jp list affects those in other countries > (any other country) then that decision needs to be made on the core > English language list. Therefore the jp list would bring a proposal > here.
<snip> I'd like to challenge the concept that there are decisions that might be made that effect "only" interests in a single country. I don't think there is such thing. Certainly there might be some members of this project who are interested in only the Japanese version, or only the English version or only the French version of AOOo. But there are also many others -- and I count myself as one of them -- who are interested in creating a localized office suite that can be deployed to larger multinational corporations and other institutions. So my interests cut across all languages. I wouldn't assume that just because I don't speak Japanese that I don't have a strong interest in the success of the Japanese version of AOOo, or that I cannot tap into Japanese language expertise to help evaluate a proposal. In other words the stakeholders for AOOo are more than just individual end-users who download and install the product. The stakeholders also include downstream consumers, distributors, hardware vendors who bundle, etc. Some of these interests are represented on the PPMC. And their interests often transcend a single language. -Rob
