Re:Source comments are in german (woohoo) (Score 1)

Hi there!

>It's bad almost by definition, at least in the free software world, to comment code in a non-English language.

I totally agree that it's much better if comments are in english.

But this is a historical grown source, the oldest parts of it are about 10 years old.

As soon as it could be forseen that development will continue in an international team of developers ( that is after being bought by Sun ) new comments have been done using english language, well at least we tried to ;-)

Changing all the old comments takes a lot of time tho and is just not yet finished, like a lot of other stuff, that is one of the reason that it's an pre-alpha version.

Of course SUN could have delayed the opening of the source code for let's say 1 or 2 years till all old comments have been translated and till everything is perfectly working and stable.

But as far as I understand it that's not the OpenSource way of doing things. Famous quote from the Cathedral and the Bazaar: publish early publish often.

Folks it's Open Source now if it bothers you that there are some source code comments in german join the team and fix it. I do believe that there are a lot of skilled german open source programmers out there that can help with translating comments while changing the source :-)

>I would have thought that Sun changed more stuff, because it's been a while since they bought the german company star division, that originally wrote SO.

Well Sun buying Star Division did gladfully NOT mean that all the Star Division developers had been fired. Actually a lot of the former Star Division and new Sun StarOffice developers will continue to work on OpenOffice and will try to speed up new developers joining the openoffice.org community in being able to understand and change the source.

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Bernd