A group of Android enthusiasts is planning to create the Hungarian
localization for Android and contribute it to AOSP.
We are organizing on the Hundroid list:
http://groups.google.com/group/android-hu
We would like to use an online translation tool like Launchpad or
Pootle to do the translation.
There are a few technical / administrative questions:
1. Regarding the CLAs: In such online tools people's contributions
tend to end up in different parts of the system. Should everyone
involved have a CLA on file?
2. Even if everyone has a CLA on file, it is just not possible to send
in the individual contributions separately. Is it OK to just send the
contribution as a single changeset?
3. Launchpad requires to license the translations under BSD license.
Is it ok to "relicense" these translations to Apache 2.0 when sending
in the contribution?
Best Regards,
Gergely
I do think that it'd be great to be able to be able to augment
resources of other apps at run-time, but that's quite a separate
issue. One of the keys here is probably to deal with the security
aspects, such that an external translation can only change resources
when the relevant language is selected, and probably such that it can
only modify strings (i.e. not layouts or drawables). Dianne, do you
have an opinion about this?
Thank you for the legal non-advice :)
You described pretty much, what I was thinking myself.
Is there a way to get an official statement from someone at AOSP? Or
we need to first make a submission so that you can open a ticket
internally or whatever process you need to follow?
I don't want to overcomplicate things, but we really would like to do
things in an AOSP compatible way.
We could just go and create the 2 git repositories somewhere else to
host the manifest and the translation files. "End users" would see no
difference, they would simply use our builds, and would not care about
the build manifest.
But we think that working this process out has value to AOSP and would
enable other small languages to have good support.
Basically we have discussed to methods in our group: (I just include
it here again for reference, if you want to forward it internally.)
1. Use a separate Pootle installation and require all contributors to
have a CLA on file. Then someone would create changesets from these
online translations and upload through Gerrit into the future
translation repository. I think this is straightforward from the
licensing perspective. We will use this approach if we cannot get a
clear statement on the other one.
2. The other method that came up is to use Launchpad.net for the
translations. The main benefit would be to get access to the
translation memory stored there, which could make the work faster.
However, Launchpad.net requires all translations be under the BSD
license, owned by the individual translators. As far as I know the BSD
license allows relicensing, as long as the original copyright and
license is kept intact. I am not sure how this is done properly.
But since I am not a lawyer, and don't want to be one, if there is no
quick way to solve this, we will just go with option 1.
For reference here are the licensing related links to Launchpad.net
https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/LicensingFAQ
https://help.launchpad.net/TermsofUse
If we go with Pootle and it works out well, we might open it up for
other teams too. If it is worth it, I could even try to integrate user
management with Gerrit to make sure that only people with a CLA on
file get access.
Thank you again and Best Regards,
Gergely