Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["Nathan R. Yergler" <nathan AT creativecommons.org>]

> Have you considered using Mark Shuttleworth's Rosetta system at 
> launchpad.net?  That's what he's using for Ubuntu, and I understand that 
> Rosetta is supposed to be very good and well-maintained.  They have a lot 
> of plans for that project, so CC could benefit from the effort Canonical, 
> Inc., plans to put into that.

We did consider Rosetta.  It is a very nice looking tool, and has lots
of desirable features.  That said, we chose Pootle for several reasons:

* It has all the features we really need -- through the web editting,
direct PO file manipulation, user permissions, multiple projects, etc
* We could set it up in an afternoon with some help from Dwayne; in
contrast I tried to configure Rosetta for ccPublisher last week to give
it a try.  It requires that you upload your .pot files and they are
imported by an admin.  Ours are still sitting in the queue (until I
delete them momentarily).  So a > 7 day turn around doesn't seem worth
the additional features which we don't need.
* Pootle is Open Source, Rosetta is not.  I don't care about degrees of
freedom (ie, GPL v MIT v ...), but the ability to figure out what's
going on when problems occur is important to me.  I'm not questioning
Ubuntu or Canonical's support for Open Source development; to the
contrary, they're doing amazing work, and as such are very busy (see: >
1 week turn around).  So I like to be able to fix it myself if necessary.
* Adding new projects is trivial

So its really not any one thing -- if the import had happened
auto-magically, it would probably have been a much more difficult
decision.  That said, I'm incredibly happy with Pootle and think it will
be a good choice for us in the long term.


Nathan

-- 
Nathan R. Yergler
Software Engineer
Creative Commons

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:NathanYergler