Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines

Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines

Posted Jul 13, 2006 9:40 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines

Nice stuff, but a suggestion to the FSFE: run this sort of thing past a couple of native English speakers before publication.

For example, this brought my inner parser to a screeching halt:

"If we are to believe Microsofts numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. This is a task that good software developers do during the development of software, and a hallmark of bad engineering,"

This says either that writing documentation is a hallmark of bad engineering or that failing to document your own software is a task that good developers do. (There's also a missing apostrophe, but native English speakers are now worse at apostrophisation than Europeans are, so I'll not harp on that ;) )

And there are typos:

During the main hearing at the European Court of Justice toward the end of April, the president and founder of Samba Dr. Andrew Tridgell presented the work of the Samba Team work.

Proofreading might not catch things like this (humans are notoriously good at missing such things), but it certainly might push up the probability of zapping them.

Oh, and one last pick:

He concludes: "When will society refuse to legitimise such business practices by buying from companies that exhibit such behaviour?"

You probably meant 'cease to legitimise', and even then the sentence is clumsy: it's ambiguous as to whether buyigng from companies constitutes refusal or not, and my first parse was that it would (oops, wrong).

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