Re: fedora only for US users ?

[Nicolas Mailhot <Nicolas Mailhot laPoste net>]

David Necas (Yeti) wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 07:23:13PM +0100, Julien Olivier wrote:
>
> > You're right ! But those problems are _nothing_ compared to the problems
> > you face when you don't speak a single word of English and yet have to
> > use English-only apps.
>
>
> But then we are no longer talkig about developers and early
> adopters.  When one can't read README's in tarballs, one can
> hardly fall into these categories.

Being an early adopter does not mean one's fluent in english. (Nor that 
one is proficent technicaly for that matter)

Telsa is a great example at Gnome why someone that does not understand 
why something is supposed to fail (like a technical person) makes a 
perfect tester.

The people who are going to use your system most are non-technical 
persons that do not speak english well or at all, if only for 
demographic reasons. Don't you see the wall you're running into if you 
knowingly exclude them from most testing stage ?

I case you didn't notice, some of the biggest free software wins lately 
were in regions that were dissatisfied with the piss-poor (or lack 
altogether of) local translations of big proprietary solutions (because 
big corps think like you do that english is good enough for everybody 
and localizing a second thought).

Few non-english speakers will contribute code right. English is the de 
facto computing ligua franca right now. But these populations can help a 
lot with testing and should not be ignored.

(btw it says a lot RedHat never noticed how offensive anaconda's joke 
about redneck could be to people who have to bear all day with 
english-only apps)

--
Nicolas Mailhot