VIA releases open source Xorg driver

But then again, the variables and comments in the code of the kernel, xorg and such are English. Don't those porgrammers neer to check the source of the larger programs that they write for?

You need to know more than "a few keywords". Any non-trivial program will draw heavily on libraries (starting with the standard libraries) which have APIs generally written in English. Note that the classic, trivial "Hello World" program which starts the most famous introductory book to C in the world uses only one word that is (arguably) a keyword (#include, which is really part of the preprocessor, not, technically, a core keyword). Although you can substitute whatever you want for the text string "Hello World", to understand even this simplest of C programs, you need to recognize the English words "include", "main" and "print" (the latter in a confusing form with an extra letter on the end). And you still haven't gotten to the keywords.

And, of course, without a knowledge of English, the fact that "stdio" might be short for "standard input/output" will be completely lost on you. (Even with English, this might not be obvious at first.)

Ironically, because the default locale is 8-bit ascii, you'll need to know <em>more</em> English words to write a program that works in another language than you would to write one that works in English. At a minimum, you'll need to learn "locale" and "set". Neither of which, again, are keywords or even parts of keywords. :)

This isn't to say that you <em>can't</em> learn to program in C with only a bare minimum knowledge of English--we've both seen it done. But the bar is still higher than you suggest--"a few keywords" is far from sufficient.

I was raised with exposure to other cultures, African, European, USian,
but nothing eastern, so it has always intrigued me.

Consider just one thing by itself, how characters translate into words
and what assumptions one makes about the world based on that from a very
early age, as they learn to read, etc. I can't help but think that were
I to read/write a language where a character was a word and a word was a
character, I'd likely have a very different viewpoint on the world and
how it worked and what made it tick, based on that alone. Not wrong,
just very very different. Certainly, logic is logic, but one's
assumptions and axioms would surely be very different if one were used to
thinking of individual characters as having the meaning of words, and
perhaps extending that to one's assumptions of how the world in general
worked.

So yes, I can certainly see how culture and world-view would
be /entirely/ different, and that it could and would seriously affect
one's ability to participate in the to this point mostly western FLOSS
community across a cultural gap of that degree.

Hiring Harald Welte as a liaison will certainly benefit both Via and the
FLOSS community as each side learns to work better with the other,
without causing or taking unnecessary offense, while learning to see
things from the vantage point of an entirely different world-view.

That said, as a purely practical matter, until they started making this
very serious effort, I certainly didn't feel obligated to buy Via, any
more than I felt obligated to buy MSI when I visited their site
researching mobos, and found everything, from the docs to the BIOS flash
packages, in MS executable, probably self-extracting-executable-zip,
format. (Yes, I /did/ write them an email, telling them exactly why they
were getting crossed off my list in terms of further consideration.) Via
could do its thing and I could do mine, and if they didn't make it easy
to do mine, well, there were other products to buy. Simple as that.

But I'm glad that's changing as it's nice to have choices! =:^)

Duncan

It's amazing how often I'm able to understand technical discussions in Indo-European languages I don't know using only cognates and technical terms.

> so please don't compare the spanish/english situation to a chinese/english situation.

That was most certainly not my intention. I was just sharing my thoughts (as answer to the original poster), that it seems possible (but certainly no easy) these days to participate in FLOSS community without knowing English.