translations (was: Re: Are we good enough ?)

[Alessandro Rubini <rubini@prosa.it>]

Hello.

Alfredo notes:
> it says that permission from the authors is required for
> distribution of translations of the manuals, although such
> permission is not required for the distribution of the
> originals. [...]  why this difference between the freedom of
> distribution of translations in comparison to the distribuiton of
> the original texts?

Usually, licenses that allow creating derived documents usually allow
translations as well. Licences that don't allow derived documents
don't allow translations.

The point is that a translation is not the original document.For
example, the FSF only allows verbatim copies of the articles on their
web site, while translations must be approved (not by RMS, usually,
but by trusted people who know the target language).

"Open Sources" has been published in Italy, but the original
translation of RMS' article was so badly written and so full of
misinterpretation and plain conceptual errors that we had to rewrite
it from scratch. Publishing such crap would damage the free software
movement rather than help it. Well, I'm curious to read the rest of
the translated book :)

/alessandro


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