Gna-gna

The best #GNASH logo

When a conference like the "Free Software in Balkans 2010" conference has people attending like Rob Savoye, Peter Salus, or Leon Shiman you can be sure of some of the best presentations possible. They know things, they have lived in interesting times and they are people that mattered and matter.

Rob Savoye is well known for his current work on Gnash, this is a Free Software implementation and then some of Adobe Flash.

among other things, Gnash maintainer Rob Savoye

As translatewiki.net was also enjoying the proceedings, the talks and the networking an obvious subject was the localisation of Gnash. The current practice is that people send in a .po file to Rob. They are welcomed and they are added.

When the subject of Flash support for MediaWiki is mentioned, invariably Gnash is mentioned as a Free substitute together with the great amount of  educational software that relies on Flash. Anticipating a positive outcome of such (technical) discussions, there will be a need to support the hundreds of languages we support and we might as well consider supporting Gnash.

With Rob Savoye involved in the internationalisation and localisation of Gnash, we may even have a foot in the door and improve on the Gettext functionality. As Niklas has indicated on translatewiki, there is a need for consistency for things like the plural rules. We are already looking for verification particularly for plural functionality of what is correct. We hope this will result in harmonised CLDR, MediaWiki and Gettext support.

The Vlora conference may lead to the localisation of Gnash at translatewiki.net, it may lead to improved internationalisation support and we hope it will also bring the moment closer where Flash content is supported in the Wikimedia Foundation's projects.

For me the Free Software in Balkans conference proved a really relevant conference... (to be continued)
Thanks,
      GerardM