[indiana-discuss] [i18n-discuss] OpenSolaris 2008.11 build_98 test results

[W. Wayne Liauh]

> > Oops, forgot to mention this.  Most if not all of
> the contact persons in
> > the copyright page (for porting the Chewing IME to
> Solaris) are no
> > longer with Sun.  For sake of showing at least some
> sincerity, perhaps
> > this page should be updated.  :-(
> 
> Hmm ... it may need to be updated (I wouldn't know
> ;-), but I wouldn't 
> ascribe this delay to insincerity or any other
> conscious dragging-of-feet - 
> maybe it's just that the people who're still here are
> rather busy ...
> 
> Michael
> -- 
> Michael Schuster     http://blogs.sun.com/recursion
> Recursion, n.: see 'Recursion'

Yeah, when you, except under a very narrow set of conditions, cannot type the name of the President of China (in its native Chinese characters) into the "save file as" window in, and only in, the Solaris version of OpenOffice.org (it becomes garbled), and that Chinese characters show up, totally unexpectedly, in the menu bars of the English version of Thunderbird and Firefox, this is more than, IMO, just insincerity, but an on-your-face proclamation of "I don't give it a damn".

But, honestly, I believe this is Sun's internal politics that works at its worst.  Individual developers are not willing to cross the political lines.  In the first example, I am sensing that Sun's Solaris developers think this is an OpenOffice issue, and are unwilling to offend their colleagues in Hamburg; whereas Sun's Hamburg team plays deaf because it is Chinese characters--something they don't understand--that are garbled.

I mentioned this problem (by email) to one of Sun's OpenOffice community managers when he gave a talk in Beijing.  He was very careful not to touch this issue because he thinks, very sincerely, that it belongs to the OpenSolaris political domain.  At the end, it is the quality of the product that will suffer.  But if you are not part of the QA team, you'd better not make any wave.  :-)
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