The Native-Lang Newsletter

THE NATIVE-LANG NEWSLETTER
===================

Issue n° 01 April 2004

Welcome to the Native-Lang Newsletter! This newletter will keep you
updated on what's going on inside the Native-Lang Confederation of
OpenOffice.org We'll try to collect every piece of interesting news
inside the Native-Lang projects, at the level of the Confederation and
we'll also provide some insights on localizations, marketing,
development, etc...

As this is our first issue, we will cover not only what happened in
April but also what has been going on some time before.

1.*New Native-Lang Projects to be created*

* Two new Native-Lang Projects are on their way to be created: The
Azeri Project led by Emin Huseynov is at this moment in his pre-set up
phase. Emin wanted to start the Localization effort first, but insisted
on providing his community a meeting place here on OpenOffice.org. The
domain name hasn't been set up yet (no JCA nor ssh keys submitted).
However Charles-H. Schulz has spent some times helping out Emin off
list and asked Rail Aliev and Görkem Cetin from the Russian and Turkish
Project to bring Emin and his community on the right track.

* Ukrainian Native-Lang Project proposal accepted: Led by Mr Vad V.
Mashckoff (Adiel), backed by the Alt Linux Community and OSDN Ukraine,
the project will soon start. The Localization effort however is being
undertaken by Sergyi Kudryk and will remain a separate initiative on
SourceForge.




2.*Talk-shows & Politics*

* After two months of off list work involving discussions with many
native-lang leads, Charles-H. Schulz comes up with what he believes
will be the "Next Big Thing" ©  for the Native-Lang Confederation.

* Proposal for the Directorates for the Native-Lang Confederation
posted and voted on; despite a big majority in favor of the reform
Charles-H. Schulz halted the process in order to propose a set of ideas
to be implemented that would acknowledge and prevent possible risks of
failure.

* Software Patents not welcomed at all: the Homepage of OpenOffice.org
and many native-lang projects as well have displayed their solidarity
agains the Software Patents in the European Union. Simon Brouwer, lead
of the Dutch (nl) native-lang community launched the momentum and got
many followers.

* Native-Lang Confederation Guidelines revised and augmented by
Charles-H. Schulz: new policies on projects'setup and creation
processes and dispute settlement policies inside the native-lang
projects.



3.*Localizations*

* Ainu Localization effort started: Despite some cultural issues making
the translation of technical terms difficult, the Ainu people will get
OpenOffice.org in their own language; HiranoKazunari, one of the lead
of the Japanese Native-lang Project works on it with several other
volunteers. Louis proposed to interview the Ainu team.

* Pavel Janik has extracted  the Readme  files of the upcoming 1.1.2 in
order to allow the native-lang projects to translate them and hence
provide 100% translated builds in every available language.

* Many localized 1.1.1 builds released: Prague gets multilingual:
French, German, Danish, Turkish, Japanese, Italian and many more
available for download.



4.*Development & Software*

* OOVirg, FontOO, OOConv get translated in several languages: after
having included OOVirg in  the OOo software suite, the add-ons family
from the Native-Lang projects are getting a widespread use thanks to
their translations in several languages. Last to date but not least,
OOConv has been translated in Hungarian. Congratulations to their
authors and translators!




5.*Marketing & Communication*

* Largest marketing action for OOo and FLOSS takes place in Catalunya: 
25th of April 2004: quoted from Jesus Corrius, lead of the Catalan
Native-Lang Project:

"One of the biggest newspapers in Spain, el Periodico de Catalunya[1]
is going to give away for free a copy of a CD-ROM that we at Softcatalà 
put together with software localised into Catalan. The Catalan
government is paying the cost of producing the copies of the CD-ROM.
The CD-ROM includes OpenOffice.org 1.1, Abiword, Mozilla, FireFox, and
other free software tools and documents localised into Catalan by the
people arround the Softcatalà community. Windows and GNU/Linux versions
are included. [....] The newspaper has produced 310.000 copies of the
CD-ROM This is the large action never done in Catalonia to distribute
free software to end-users."

* Several leads, such as Marko Gronroos (fi) and Davide Dozza (it)
expressed the idea to have another web site for marketing and users'
support purposes. Albeit the discussion got stopped somewhere, the idea
is already implemented in some sense through the many different sites
and portals about OOo in specific languages and countries. CollabNet is
not that easy to use, after all....

* German Poster Contest for OpenOffice.org: congratulations to the
winners!

* Mascot Competition for OOo won by Andrea Maggioni. Thanks to Ian
Lynch for this contest that was made possible by the OOEdu initiative.

* Live from Japan: The OpenOffice.org's Official Users Guide will be
available on the 23rd of April in the bookstores of Japan, thanks to
the members of the Japanese Native-Lang Project.


6.*Other news items*

* Native-Lang Homepage re-drafted: Charles-H. Schulz collected all the
ideas and suggestions to refresh the aging native-lang homepage and
draft a new one; minor modifications remain to be done in order to
upload it.


by Charles-H. Schulz, with the help of Sophie Gautier and Jacqueline
McNally.
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