Open Translations Tools 2007: Introductions
The Open Translation Tools 2007 conference got off to an early start with every participant being asked to post a small introduction to the list. Here’s mine:
I’ll be traveling out to Zagreb on Wednesday from London Heathrow, on flight 493 (10:50 - 14:20 Split, then Split to Zagreb 15:00 - 15:45) ad home on flight 4494 Zagreb direct to London Gatwick (14:00 - 15:20) - if anyone else is on those flights, please do get in touch :-)
I’m a student on the MA Typeface Design programme at the University of Reading, UK. I’m focused on an essential but obscure element of all free culture projects: free software fonts.
My Masters degree major project is to develop a new original text typeface covering extended Latin and Malayalam scripts. I’m looking forward to meeting people already using free software in multilingual publishing contexts to better understand their needs, and explore the viability for a “free software font foundry” to support the on-going creation of new free font software.
I’m also involved with the Open Font Library community, and am looking forward to meeting up with another OFLB contributor, Alexandre Prokoudine :-)
If anyone else is interested in fonts, please do get in touch :-)
A bunch of cool stuff mentioned in everyone else’s introductions, including the video subtitling web app dotSUB, and Tactical Tech’s “NGO-in-a-box toolkits” - highly focused GNU/Linux distributions aimed at NGOs, with both software and documentation. These combine the free software and free culture movements to effect social progress, which is awesome. There is an “Open Publishing Toolkit” focused on print media, for example. I think this could be a useful example for my dissertation.
Also, chatting to Dejan ÄŒabrilo (who is in charge of localization of Tara GNU/Linux, a fully localized GNU/Linux distribution for Western Balkans users) I asked, “Are there different words for free-as-in-price and free-as-in-freedom in BCSMxyz languages?” and he replied,
Yes. Free as in beer = besplatno, and free as in speech = slobodno. With the amount of software piracy we get here, the only selling point is “slobodno” :)
This is good to hear, because chatting with Gustavo, he thought that widespread sharing of proprietary software in Brasil means really free software is less attractive there.
The Open Translations Tools 2007: Introductions by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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