[GRASS-PSC] Update: Translation Licensing in Rosetta

[Michael Barton]

On 12/5/06 6:51 AM, "Markus Neteler" <neteler at itc.it> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> [ref: Web based translation platform]
> 
> I was contacted by the Rosetta team yesterday with a followup
> of their license issue (Copyright for translations created in
> Rosetta/launchpad.net):
> 
> Related mails:
>  http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/translations/2006-June/000212.html
>  http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/translations/2006-June/000214.html
>  http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/translations/2006-July/000224.html
> 
> Their new proposal/offer is that translations would end up being
> BSD licensed, and possibly reused in other projects hosted on
> Launchpad.
> 
> We now have to decide if this works for us in order to proceed with
> Rosetta or not use it.
> 

I think I missed the original posts. I checked the emails above and they
help, but I still have questions. What would it be -- physically -- that
they would be copywriting? The individual *.po files?

Just so I understand the process...

We would give Rosetta a set of GRASS English terms (list of all menu
entries, all text gleaned from the GUI and modules).

Translation teams would translate these into various other languages.

The translation files would be shipped with GRASS, which could then use them
for much more complete internationalization.

Correct?

I looked at the legal page. There are only a few lines that pertain to these
translations.

" All translations submitted into Rosetta are the work of the translator
that created them, and are submitted under the same license as the software
being translated. In addition, the translator grants to Canonical Ltd the
right to publish the translation and use the translation in other software
packages under their license."

So since GRASS is GPL, this suggests that the translations are also GPL, but
that the translator holds copyright (though I'm still not sure to what,
since I thought that copyright is granted to an original work). Canonical
can *also* distribute the translations (word lists? *.po files?) under their
own license (which you say is BSD).

Correct?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see any problems. It will be good
to have better internationalization in GRASS.

Michael

PS: Does voting +1 mean I have to go back and add g_msg to all text lines in
the GUI? :-\

Michael

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton