Re: [gnome-cyr] More on (non-)translation of names



Јуче у 10:36, Mikhail Zabaluev написа:

> Here's a followup to the dreaded "MySQL issue" :)
> Trying to find what the MySQL's parent company thinks on translating
> their trademark names, I've come across this:

Exactly, their "trademark names".  Why should consumers care about
them?  If they appreciate their product enough, they'll find a way to
advertise it themselves, there's no need to do it without wanting to.

It's all right to respect someone's brand and trade mark, but not at
the cost of language.  I surely put my native language ahead of it.
Others do as they well please, but don't call for everybody to act in
such a (foolish, I might say) way.

> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/ru/Russian-terms.html
>
> Note how generic terms are translated, but unique names are left
> intact (non-translation of MySQL itself is not even mentioned).
> This is one more example of the commonly accepted practice,
> adopted this time by an open-source project.
> Do we still think we know better? :)

I certainly do.  A company trying to sell more licenses is definitely
not an "open-source" project.  It hardly works like any other
open-source project: it's run by a single company, it insists on all
your code using MySQL (even as a client) being GPL (I don't mind that),
etc.

It's company that has open-sourced their product, it's not an
open-source project.  They're having marketing benefits from it, but
they also dual license it, in order to "trick" us.  That means that
they will *never* accept patches unless you, as a contributor, agree
to dual license it as well (under a non-free license).  So, you don't
even have a chance at trying to get your patches in, but you must
fork immediately, for however trivial your changes might be (compared
to the rest of the codebase).

I don't know if MySQL yet includes UCA (Unicode Collation
Algorithm, Unicode TR10) implementation, but I've provided partly
implemented one for 3.23 long time ago (perhaps three years ago).
Before they even considered it, they stated that they would have to
reimplement it all from scratch.  Is that the merit of open-source?

I'm happy to say that no marketing department is going to determine
how I speak, write and use *my* language.  Thanks for the offer, anyway.

Cheers,
Danilo



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]