Frequently Asked Questions

What are benefits of open source projects to us?
How can I contribute to prompting open source development of translation tools?
Why shall I launch an open source project?
Why shall I choose OSTTI.net instead of SourceForge.net?
Proposal for open source development of translation tools.

What are benefits of open source projects to us?

Open source projects make it possible for the localization industry to aggregate more resources for developing localization tools and use the resources in a more efficient manner. Tool users whether localization customers or service providers will be benefited from:

• More options with less investment on tools
• Continuous improvement on functionality and reliability of tools
• Easily customizing tools for special purpose based on open source projects instead of from scratch
• Minimum issues of resource constraints
• Reducing worry about buying from the competitors

Besides, there're additional benefits for some tool owners:

• Building brand and reputation to sell lines of products/services to the customers
• Gaining general competitive advantages

For how, please refer to http://www.betterlocalization.com/index.php?itemid=17 for details.
For researchers of academic institutes, they may benefit from quicken research with more participants, practices and free resource.

How can I contribute to prompting open source development of translation tools?

OSTTI is a community of MT/CAT enthusiasts. You can contribute by actively involved in the day-to-day happenings in OSTTI community, or developing great new products/features, or just plain passionate about MT/CAT. 

There are many ways and multiple levels in which you can become involved in OSTTI community. We welcome everybody who wants to become involved in the community. Even if you are not a programmer, there are ways that you can benefit from OSTTI and ways to help make OSTTI more useful to yourself and others.

Get Started...

·         Be an Active Listener

You can find out what is going on in the OSTTI Community and about open source MT/CAT in the world by reading the News and/or by subscribing to the various mailing lists. These mailing lists are very low-traffic and are reserved for sending out to only opt-in members of it.

• Be an End-user

You can download the released version and try it out, to see if it performs well as designed. After trying out these great products, please feedback what you think about it through Forums, mailing lists etc. You may also writing documentations and proposing new features that come to your mind when using the products.

Get Involved...

• Be a Tester

Anybody -- developers, testers or end users -- should feel free to alert the issues encountered with the products, or ideas for ways to make it better. If you have run into something you would like to report, you can report bugs/issues encountered testing the products.

• Be a Developer

You can download the source code and build components, improve functions, fix bugs, submit patches, write technical/design documents, develop new features...It is also a good idea for all developers to subscribe to various mailing lists for good communication of all OSTTI Developers.

• Be a Visionary

If you feel that existing products do not meet your needs and you would like to propose an extension or a totally new project, then please feel free to do so. Community members are encouraged to propose new projects and develop new features. You can engage projects leaders to get feedback about your feature proposals or engage OSTTI Admin about your new projects proposals, and then solicit other developers who might pitch in with resources to develop your proposed feature/projects after it's approved finally.

OSTTI, as the initiator of this community, take the mission seriously and contribute to it by hosting this site, building and advocating the community, motivating the participants, even actively participating in products architecture and contributing codes if possible.

Why shall I launch an open source project?

• We are localization/translation customers, why shall we open source our existing priority tools developed for internal use?

You may keep your priority tools closed within your organization, or you can obtain benefits as below by making it open-source.

• Continuously improving the tools with contribution from extended base of users.
• Reducing internal resources for maintaining and improving the tools.
• Build reputation for your organization.

The open source shall not be a hard decision since initially your organization doesn't expect gaining any economic benefits from selling this sort of tools. A common concern is whether if your open source tools would benefit your competitors since you cannot stop them from use the tools free. You have to evaluate it but for the most cases, the worry is not necessary because

• Not all of your competitors can use your tools due to the technique limitation.
• Not all of your competitors are wiling to use your tools for non-technical consideration.
• Even some of your competitors choose your tools finally, you will get more benefits than them because you're the owner of the product still.

If you want a real-world story, see what Sun Microsystems did with their translation tools: 

https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/

o        We are a translation tools developer, why shall we open source our products?

You don't have to open source your products if your business operates well with closed-source model. However, you have reason to consider open source business model if you face one of the below situations.

• You are a small or newly established translation tool development business.
• You want to utilize the legacy products to the best.
• You want to enter a new market, seize the share, and grow up quickly.

Certainly you have to consider how you can gain economic benefits finally before you go open source. There are several models from which you may choose. For more clues about these models, see http://www.betterlocalization.com/index.php?itemid=17.

o        We are a language service provider, what benefits can we obtain from launching an open source project? (And we are small, do you think we afford an open source project?)

You will not worry about your scale and resource availability much if you know there are many open source projects that were initialized by individual. How small your business would be, you must have more resource than an individual person. In fact, open source is a choice to address your resource limitation.

If you don't have much internal resources for the project, the key is how to attract contributions from the outside. And then, how to get your investment returned. Basically, you can make your offer of language services with the products, technology, credit and publicity that your OS projects may bring. It sounds not easy but it is feasible. If you want to know more about the open source business models, have a look at this article http://www.betterlocalization.com/index.php?itemid=17.

• We are from academic side, why shall we collaborate with OSTTI community?

Firstly, why shall not you share your research outcome with more people if your research project is publicly founded?

Secondly, although you don't want to gain profit with your projects, how about if you can get more work done with a smaller budget? You can utilize the open source software product or framework for your own project. You can also open source your research and software. If the OSTTI community pick up your idea or software, you can have your research topic pushed forward fast in a user-driven manner.

Why shall I choose OSTTI.net instead of SourceForge.net?

OSTTI is dedicated to translation technology and SourceForge is not. 

We are aggregating information, resources, and eyeballs of associates to OSTTI.net, where an OS MT/CAT community is forming. We will continuously promote the concept of open source everywhere translation tool is a concern. All these efforts will make OSTTI.net the first place that people think of when hey need to know open source MT/CAT ideas, people, projects, and products. 

While very few of SourceForge visitors would be interested in your translation tool project, most of visitors of OSTTI.net are ones that you want to collaborate with. Simply by hosting your OS MT/CAT project at OSTTI.net, you can make your project known by more of the potential users and contributors.

Proposal for open source development of translation tools

OSTTI.net is always interested in and welcome proposals for new projects. The proposals can come from any organizations, business or individuals. In order to maintain OSTTI highly matched its vision and mission, please ensure your project proposals are MT/CAT related and have been discussed in a certain range and that consensus is reached about the need for a new project. OSTTI Admin shall has its solely judgment on approving the proposals or not finally.

Besides filling the new projects proposal onsite, we ask you send a mail to Admin@Ostti.net with following information:

1. Project full name
2. Project Purpose And Summarization - a detailed, accurate description of your project and what OSTTI community resources and in which way you plan to use. This description will be the basis for the approval or rejection of your project's hosting on OSTTI community, and later, to ensure that you are using the services in the intended way.
3. Proposed license
4. Proposed "UNIX name" for the project - In addition to full project name, you will need to choose short, "Unix" name for your project. The "Unix Name" has several restrictions because it is used in so many places around the site. They are: 
• Cannot match the unix name of any other project
• Must be between 3 and 28 characters in length
• Must be in lower case
• Can only contain characters, numbers, and dashes
• Must be a valid unix username
• Cannot match one of our reserved domains
• Unix name will never change for this project

Your unix name is important, however, because it will be used for many things, including:

• A web site at unixname.ostti.net
• A CVS Repository root of /cvsroot/unixname at cvs.unixname.ostti.net
• Shell access to unixname.ostti.net
• Search engines throughout the site
4. Project leads
5. Tool use on OSTTI community - Please note which tools you plan to use and how.

We know this is a lot to ask up front, but it's good to agree on all of this before a project is created, rather than afterward.