Re: Arabeyes -- a critique

[Abdulhaq Lynch <al-arabeyes at alinsyria dot fsnet dot co dot uk>]

assalaamu `alaykum

I dont' understand the self-flagellation and cries of doom that are from time 
to time uttered here.

In the FOSS world 99% of developers are doing their (voluntary) work because 
they enjoy it. If their work becomes dull or tedious they will stop. The same 
applies, I believe, here, although there are some other incentives relating 
to, perhaps, 'political' reasons. But primarily we/you work for the pleasure 
of solving the problem, and the enjoyment of seeing the solution and people 
using our software.

Take away that pleasure, or make the work painful enough, and the work will 
stop.

Now, in respect of arabising something like OpenOffice, the primary emotion 
one feels is pure pain. I checked out the source code and had a look. Even 
compiling this 80MB beast is a feat in itself. For most types of work I could 
just pick a small part of the app, equation rendering for example, and try to 
improve it - perhaps I need to understand 5% of the code base at the most. 
However, to arabise the code I need to get a good grasp of much larger 
sections of the code. This is pure pain and just isn't repaid by the feelings 
I might get if I ever managed to complete the job.

Incidentally, this is why so many OSS projects (arabic or not) are doomed to 
be repeated and reinvented all the time - ploughing through millions of lines 
of C to improve someone else's project is as dull as ditchwater.

Knowing this, why should I be concerned if other people are not arabising 
OpenOffice? It's an awful job and one that is far easier for an OpenOffice 
dedicated developer to do. He can go straight to the sections of code that 
need 
changing, etc. I don't demand that Thamer or some other arab should start 
punishing themselves with this job because 'they should'. FOSS doesn't work 
like that and it will be some time before it could. Perhaps if arab 
governments start seeing 'the light' then they could pay people to do it. 
Until then.. (the words 'hell' and 'freezing over' spring to mind')...

Until as mentioned elsewhere the people in the Middle East start to feel that 
they should pay for using MSOffice etc, then there is no incentive for Red 
Hat et al. to arabise linux as they can't compete with a free MSOffice/XP.

In conclusion I think that we should accept that, whatever the arabeyes 
charter etc. says, we are here for personal reasons where pleasant emotions 
are expected and to demand/expect that any group of people start punishing 
themselves voluntarily is asking too much.

And by the way, it's not a lack of talent. The ability is here. It's the large 
amounts of time and the willingness to undergo root canal surgery that is 
missing.

I do agree that compared to the number of PC's in the arab world, the interest 
in FOSS is surprisingly low. That is a huge topic for discussion in itself.

wassalaam
abdulhaq
On Thursday 13 January 2005 07:20, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:
> Arabeyes has been at the forefront of the FOSS [1] Arabization efforts.
> It began with general ideas and evolved to concrete goals and agendas
> which have taken it from a group of wishful thinkers to a group of
> doers.
>
> Throughout the 3 years of its operations, Arabeyes has seen many ups and
> downs, internal and external battles and a plethora of challenges. Its
> survival can easily be attributed to the determination of a few key
> contributors.
>
> The challenge that no one seems to have given much thought to is, what
> will become of Arabeyes once the Arabization of FOSS is complete? Or is
> this a never ending process? If indeed it is a never-ending process then
> one can safely state that Arabeyes has degraded to its initial state of
> being a bunch of general ideas and no conrete goals.
>
> It is unthinkable that Arabization is something that we will be doing
> for the next 20 years. However, there will be one issue remaining which
> will require constant updates and maintenance -- namely, translation.
> The question would then be, do we want Arabeyes to end up being a
> primarily translation effort?
>
> This is not to belittle the hard work involved in translating GUI's and
> various other documents. However, translation alone has and should not
> be the primary business of Arabeyes.
>
> One could say that Arabeyes can be involved in setting standards with
> the various standardization bodies once it is a legal entity. Even if
> Arabeyes becomes a legal entity and is able to collect enough donations
> to pay to join consortiums such as Unicode, W3C, etc., it will not be
> enough.
>
> Going through all of Arabeyes contributors, the reality is, technical
> expertise is seriously lacking. How many real contributions have
> Arabeyes volunteers made to OpenOffice [2]? What about Wine [3], KDE
> [4], GNOME [5]? It is not only a question of time and a flat number of
> contributors. What no one seems to be willing to admit is that we simply
> do not have the people with the know-how. Is it not shameful that
> Arabeyes had nothing to do with the actual development work involved
> with allowing Arabic support under Debian Installer [6]? How can we even
> claim fame when we have others doing the real work and all we end up
> doing is translating a bunch of PO's?
>
> In the beginning of 2003, I have posted a few recommendations [7] to
> overcome this technical lacking by introducing a mentoring program.
> Despite this being accepted as a 'nice idea' in principle, no effort
> whatsoever has been put to make it a reality. This is mainly because
> Arabeyes is too engulfed in its day-to-day activities with no more focus
> on the big picture. This by no means is to say that the above mentioned
> recommendations are the only or best way to proceed -- they are merely
> suggestions that have had a very very short thread associated with it.
> This simply shows that no real interest has really been given to an
> otherwise rather important issue. It is a survival issue.
> Unfortunately, we seem to be more interested in issuing press releases
> and doing interviews than dealing with the future of Arabeyes as a
> project.
>
> >From what I am seeing today and from personal experiences from the very
>
> foundation of Arabeyes, I see no real future for the project. It is the
> equivalent of building an airplane manufacturing plant but not having
> the human resources to build anything in it. I will be posting some
> recommendations that may help us survive the current situation, but if
> my predictions are true, they will be shelved just like all other
> long-term vision-based proposals.
>
>
> REFERENCES:
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foss
> [2] http://www.openoffice.org/
> [3] http://www.winehq.org/
> [4] http://www.kde.org/
> [5] http://www.gnome.org/
> [6] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
> [7] http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/core/2003/January/msg00000.html
>
>
>
> Regards,
> Mohammed Elzubeir