Re: Great news: KACST is going to begin working in translation next week

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

--- Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa> wrote:
[...]
> Please, all of you working on arabeyes, give your view point NOW. Don't keep 
> silent please.

Actually I didn't answer that because I was off the 'doc' list. I am returning now.
I am not sure if I can be regarded as an impartial critic, specially as
this discussion is started by Munzir, but what the essence of the
problem as far as I understood is that there is no current way in
Arabeyes to deal with contributions from institutions, except financial
donations, and that Munzir is initiating such a way on his own.

While I didn't know of all of this till yesterday, I am paraphrasing
Munzir's first letter according to my understanding:

- KACST, which can be regarded as a statutory personality, wants to
participate in various translation projects of open source projects.
They have paid manpower to do that. Notice that this is totally
different than these individuals volunteering to translate on their own.
- They are suggesting some projects like Fedora (which I believe is
already too advanced for that), OpenOffice.org (which I think can use
some help), others.
- Naturally, they expect that the credit will not go to each person
individually in their group as this is an institution job, but to them.
This includes both the thanks and the legal responsibility for their
contributions.
- Rather than doing that on their own, they want to do this through
Arabeyes.

Now I think some points should be clarified.
- All these contributions are open source, GPL, am I right?
- KACST will have the copyright on the translations. (I notice that
currently the translations are copyrighted to the individual
translators, though the Language-Team is Arabic <doc at arabeyes dot org>).
 
Probably the use of the word 'coordinator' is unfortunate, as it
confuses with the standard definitions already used here. I will use
attache till we find another word. It is also important to include
project maintainers in any work through Arabeyes projects, otherwise we
are losing the whole point of maintainers. That includes coordinating
the priorities of the individual maintainers with the priorities of the
external institution. 

As for individuals in the team registering on their own, you are
bypassing the external institution, which naturally claims more credit
and responsibility for paying and sparing them for this job than them.
They may not have the expertise necessary to use cvs, but the instituion
has throught its attache. For example, if IBM submits code to the Linux
kernel, and we found that the code is stolen from some Unix out there,
then IBM is liable, not the individual who actually copied and who may
not be known (don't know from where I got this example, do I?).

And I think that we have enough of politeness already given. Let's talk
straight here.

The issue is whether Arabeyes can coordinate with external institutions
as institutions or they cannot deal except with individuals?
In the open source world, dealing with institutions is standard
practice.
If Arabeyes agrees to deal with institutions, it can do so on its own
rules. We need to make these rules. I believe they are already available
for monetary donations and things like servers, etc.
If not, that settles it. Though I will be sorry. An important example is
that it will be difficult to get contributions from university projects
and companies, because the work of any undergraduate or postgraduate
project is copyright the university. And the GPL specifically reminds us
that your employer or school should sign a copyright disclaimer for that
reason.

As for doubt about intentions, to help or otherwise, can somebody tell
me what will we earn from making all this fuss at Arabeyes?

Salam,
Muhammad Alkarouri