On Fedora's Localization platform

[Itamar Reis Peixoto]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Dimitris Glezos <glezos at transifex.com>
wrote:

>
> Hey all,
>
> 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
> <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archive:L10N/Tools/Plans> 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
> <http://www.worddelights.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/developer-side-comparison-transifex-pootle-launchpad.png>
> , Two
> <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqevw3Q-ErDUdFgzT3VNVXQxd095bFgzODRmajJDeVE#gid=0>
> .
>
> 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 <https://translate.jboss.org/> (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
> <http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/live_servers> (Mozilla,
> Open Office), proprietary ones (Evernote, Grooveshark, Rdio) and their feature
> list <http://pootle.translatehouse.org/discover.html> 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
> <https://www.transifex.com/customers/open-source/>. There are projects on
> Tx with as many as 1 Billion words being translated by 14.000 people.
> Joomla
> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/tnaypyaylxnausr/Screenshot%202014-07-17%2013.11.50.png> 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
>    <https://www.dropbox.com/s/o4htl010ieo38iw/Screenshot%202014-07-17%2012.40.10.png>
>    to constantly recognize our most active translators. Send them a t-shirt or
>    even simply mention them in the release notes.
>    - Nurture teams
>    <https://www.dropbox.com/s/3dtubts36oxhk1q/Screenshot%202014-07-17%2012.46.37.png>
>    by identifying inactive members and refreshing them.
>    - Help community members prioritize
>    <https://www.dropbox.com/s/5xbmbc2m1elmcva/Screenshot%202014-07-17%2012.49.20.png>
>    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
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Dimitris Glezos
> Founder & CEO, Transifex
> https://www.transifex.com/
>
> --
>
>
>
do we really need to migrate all stuff off now ? I think no.

I think we should consider to keep all current stuff in TX and start using
zanata or other tool for new stuff.
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