[Debian-l10n-devel] [Translate-devel] Looking at translate-toolkit 1.10

[Alexander Dupuy]

Stuart wrote:
> Could you also confirm whether share/stoplist-en is the work of translate-
> toolkit authors (and GPL'd) or whether it, like the lm files, has been
> imported from elsewhere? (it appeared as a largely complete file in svn r8066 but
> that doesn't tell me if it was just developed outside the VCS or if it has been
> borrowed)

Dwayne replied:
> This arrived with poterminology written by Alex Dupuy, so we'll need to
> check with him on the authorship and license.

This file was my own creation, based on research and experimentation that I did (I did collect a number of stopword lists from various places around the internet, but they were more inspiration than source).  I am also responsible for the rather obscure syntax in the file (although I am quite glad I did document it in some detail - http://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/commands/poterminology_stopword_file.html) - I can only offer my apologies, and say that it grew somewhat organically, and that at least it is simpler than a Sendmail configuration file :-)

My feeling about these sorts of configurable/tuning files is that explicitly stating the copyright within them misses the point - they are intended to be adapted for the use of particular projects - there really is no way to distribute them in non-source form in any case.  I tend to prefer to keep things simple and leave them in the public domain, even though I know that the concept of public domain is not globally applicable.  Still, in this case where the file is just a bunch of English words with some not-quite-random punctuation right before them, I don't see much benefit to an explicit license on its contents.

But if anybody feels that they want to put an explicit license into it, lines beginning with '#' are comments in the file, and I hereby give my permission to anyone to do so, in the spirit of the old AT&T /bin/true (see http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html).

@alex