Re: [Freecats-Dev] Daniel On The Road [was: Python GUI builders...]

[Henri Chorand]

Hi Daniel,

> Writting from hostel in Rome...

If you have the opportunity, pay a salute for me to the statues of this
fountain in the piazza di Navonna (not sure about the spelling, sorry) - you
know, the ones that look so frightened by the church nearby, in case it
would fall down at their feet.


> I worked in Amsterdam.  Sure, thing.  I'll talk to folks at Lionbridge.
> Wasn't sure if corporate influence was in the interest of the project :)
> But yes, I'll work on it.  Lionbridge (at least the CTO) is very
interested
> in Open Source.

I believe you want to speak about Mr Jonathan Clark.

The trouble is, as Lionbridge went into open-sourcing their Foreign Desk
software, in order to raise interest in Free CATS, we might also have to do
some diplomatic work ;-)


One to two years ago, Simos Xenitellis and I spent time contacting Jonathan
Clark in order to establish contact and to begin cooperating by: raising
awareness and growing the user base among the community of professional
translators, suggesting new (reasonable) features, asking for an end-users
portal, propose to translate the software & documentation... (French and
Russian teams were ready to start). But none of this ever could be put into
place, whatever the reason, and it does not come from me.
I exchanged several e-mails with JC and even a couple of phone calls, and I
believe they were quite there was nothing in these that generated
misunderstanding.

Some time after, a French developer who had worked in the FD dev team
explained how they used to work completely on their own, without any user
feed-back.
Worse still, even though I asked JC, then (later) some of LB's project
managers, and despite my efforts, I never received any useful documentation
about how to import a non-FD project (e.g. a Trados-format one) into FD. I
tried to run tests with another translator, without success. Even the
administrator's manual did not explain how to do this.
Ignoring how to do it (for an end-user) means no real opportunity to use
this tool in daily work.

So, in a nutshell:
- FD is either a private joke as far as the concept of Open Source is
concerned, or the private toy of a development team. (I won't try to
determine if this state of things comes from strict guidelines from
Lionbridge's top management or from the highly-developed ego of the code's
authors.)
- It's code is based on proprietary MS tools and it's not portable.

I do hope this will change... anyway.

It's after all this that I decided to try starting Free CATS project.


> What kind of work do/did you do for Lion?

When I was still running Kemper DOC, we worked with their Valbonne (France),
Boulder, Framingham, San Francisco and even Rendsburg (Germany) teams. I
still have very good relationships with them as a free-lancer, and so I'm
very happy I regularly receive work from them.


Enjoy Roma's atmosphere (and delicious ice creams)

Cheers,

Henri