[fab] Correspondence from a wandering board member

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

:)

He's right about the distribution problem, of course.  The statements 
about RMS are interesting as well.

--g

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Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org
Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2006 20:44:25 -0500
From: Elliot Lee <sopwith at gmail.com>
To: gdk at redhat.com
Subject: Pass it on

Hey Greg,

Had dinner on Thursday night with a crazy software developer who is trying
to translate free software (starting with AbiWord) into the Quecha (the
language used by the Incas, and approximately 8 million people today).
Thought I should jot down a few insights and pass them along before I
forgot...

. gettext´s model of having English as the "master" language is a real
problem when the translators do not speak English, and shuts out
translations for a bunch of native languages where English was not the
language of the conquerors/colonists. In this case, the translators know
Spanish and Quecha, but not English, so they cannot make sense of the .po
file that has English phrases as the keys for the Quecha translations.

. The problem of distribution is real - I think we know this but don't
always understand how bad it is. It is a big pain for me to even get net
access here while travelling, and apparently dialup costs something like $35
per mo plus per minute for phone service, plus ISP charges. No idea how much
DSL costs - mucho dinero. In particular, the problem of needing to connect
to the Internet for downloading updates and new packages was raised. We need
to support the ability to configure a local package repository into the
distro and into yum, and make it easy to turn downloaded packages into a
local package repository that can be served to other computers on an ad-hoc
basis. Is OLPC going to help at all in this regards?

. RMS is a lot bigger down here because people buy into his political views.
That is probably the best argument for making Fedora have the free software
stamp - it wil buy us friends in countries where the free software message
is popular.

Anyways, pass those along to the board if they are worth anything, and say
hello for me. I have a Fedora talk this Wednesday in Lima, should be cool.

Everything is going great here. Lots of pictures, very few of which I am
managing to get onto my blog so far. It's an order of magnitude harder to
get basic computing tasks done here when you have to walk down the street in
order to use a web browser on a Windows PC with no SCP access. :)

Best,
-- Elliot