I'll share some of my thoughts at this point.
GIST
- Freedom is more than just access to a tarball. What kinds of Freedom is Fedora enjoying and giving up by using a platform like Transifex or GitHub?
- What is the Board's position about using non-open-source but open-friendly services? How much should we sacrifice to only run open-source on our servers?
- Research thoroughly all possible solutions and find out what exactly we'll be sacrificing and gaining. Pootle is much more trusted than Zanata.
- Ask all key Fedora L10n people. Past and current.
- Any switch should be led by a technical Fedora localization person.
- The goal should be to make Fedora L10n a successful project. The tools are just tools. The most important community features in Transifex have not been used.
BACKGROUND
My contributions to Fedora nowadays are limited to supporting the L10n project with our Transifex instance. I used to be a member of the Fedora Board in the past. I see there's still the title "Fedora Localization Lead" next to my name, but I suppose that's mostly because no one else took the role. Today I basically make sure the community has what they need from Transifex. I trust Piotr Drąg (raven) for any L10n leadership questions I have.
Today a decision is being brewed on the basis that Transifex is not open-source. As I mentioned, this is a discussion which needed to happen. But I find the way it's being discussed disappointing to all the years of hard work many individuals have put to establish a successful L10n platform for Fedora (including my own). Many people in Fedora (and Transifex) have invested man years to make this work. We haven't even discussed "what are the key things we need from our L10n platform"?
Following are my thoughts. I'm writing these with an effort to wear my Fedora L10n hat as much as possible. But the POV does also include my roles as Transifex's CEO, Fedora's Localization Infrastructure Lead for the past 6 years, and as one of the most experienced people on open-source localization.
ON FREEDOM
When I was young I was looking at freedom in a different way. I was more an open source zealot than today. I cared mostly about openness of the code. It didn't matter if there was only one engineer hacking on the code. What mattered was the license and little more.
Gradually I started realizing one of the reasons I loved Fedora was that it valued highly quality and community participation. It valued relationships, productivity, happiness, innovation. We valued meritocracy more than democracy. Succeeding as a distributions was more than just having the sources of packages.
I'm not a fan of the spin put on Freedom in this discussion. Fedora is free to use Transifex forever. It's free to export all data at any point (including all past translations and all the history of the translations so far) to move to another platform. And it was free to use real people from our team working on improving the platform constantly and adding new features. I've met a lot of people in Fedora. The smartest ones knew very well that Freedom is not a one-colored attribute.
MIGRATING
Migrating from one platform to another will have major costs. I led the original migration from Elvis to Tx. It required many meetings with stakeholders, research, experiments. In the end, it costed us more than half our translators.
Assuming the Freedom discussion is resolved and the benefits of the migration outweigh the costs. If I were leading this (and did not have a vested interest in one platform...), the last thing I'd want, is to go through the trouble of migrating, only to find out 5 key things we need are missing. Zero research was done on the available tools out there and how they stack with Transifex. Here are examples of research done by other projects which came across my attention: One, Two.
Ask the Transifex team itself to tell us how they compare to the other platforms on all key areas. Cover solutions like Pootle which are developed in a very open matter. Put in a spreadsheet and compare thoroughly.
This is responsible project management 101.
ZANATA
Those who have been around a while saw the Zanata push from the Red Hat teams coming with mathematical precision. Even when Transifex was being fully developed as open source, Red Hat decided to develop Zanata in parallel instead of investing in Transifex. This has always struck me as mind-boggling, given that Transifex was born in Fedora's arms and quickly became the most popular open-source localization platform.
It is all in good spirit and competition is good. I am holding no grudge against Zanata. In fact, the Zanata team's efforts to grab Fedora in the past has pushed Tx to innovate fast.
Having said this...
In terms of Freedom, out of all the localization platforms out there, and given what I've seen the past years, Zanata is developed in one of the least open ways. Which open-source projects are using Zanata? On zanata.org I can see a bunch of test projects, a few Red Hat documentation ones and JBoss (also Red Hat's). Which other projects have installed their own Zanata server and how many words are they translating?
Pootle is a much more openly developed and widely accepted platform. The leads (Dwayne and Friedel) are true open-sourcers, their team is presenting in many major open-source conferences, they're trusted by many large open-source projects (Mozilla, Open Office), proprietary ones (Evernote, Grooveshark, Rdio) and their feature list is amazing. At FOSDEM I'll go out for drinks with Friedel.
When there are tools like Pootle out there, why on Earth would Fedora even consider Zanata? Where is the research and comparison between the options we have?
TRANSIFEX
Transifex has 20+ people working full-time on the platform. A big chunk of our time is invested on open-source, community projects. There are projects on Tx with as many as 1 Billion words being translated by 14.000 people. Joomla has 2.7K translators contributing on 250 projects.
If the goal is to have a vibrant and successful Fedora Localization Project, then there are so many things to be done which make the "which tool" discussion, quite frankly, stupid. Here are a couple:
- Use Transifex's Reports to constantly recognize our most active translators. Send them a t-shirt or even simply mention them in the release notes.
- Nurture teams by identifying inactive members and refreshing them.
- Help community members prioritize which projects to translate first and remove old content.
Do we want a successful community L10n project? These are the things we should be discussing. And these are some of the things the Transifex team is investing on. "What does the roadmap look like" is a key question for the research on which tool to choose (which never happened).
ENDING THOUGHTS
As a Fedora contributor, I'm expecting a discussion for such an important topic to have higher responsibility than the one I've seen so far. This is an extremely important topic which has no place for hastiness or egos.
I'd be happy to help and wear my Fedora hat.
-d
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