Thank you Ray for sharing your thoughts about the Confluence issue. Sorry, but I felt like my suggestion was offending to the OSS notion, as it seems to preach for a non OSS product in the wrong territory. My apology if I did. I will be extra careful next time before suggesting anything. My suggestion was based on the fact that the latest releases of DSpace and Fedora Commons, both of which are OSS like Koha, are using Confluence for managing and publishing their documentation. I understand now the marketing notion that Altassian is trying to reach new clients through non-profit organizations. However, were DSpace and Fedora communities mislead as well or they are using a different business model than Koha ? Handling R2L orientation with Koha UI required quite some work at all screens, and extending such work to the documentation interface became essential for the Arabic users. This is why I thought it will be awesome if we collectively localize a documentation product, like Confluence if it fits the profile, at the source code level to handle such R2L requirements. Anyway, we will move our Arabization work for Koha (POs and PDFs for documentation) very soon to a Koha wiki location. We may need help from you to complete the movement. Thanks Massoud M. AlShareef, ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:09:58 +0100 (BST) From: MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> Subject: Re: [Koha-translate] Koha translation web site To: koha-translate@lists.koha-community.org, ayousef@kwareict.com, amaher@kwareict.com Message-ID: <20110413100958.6A435FA146@nail.towers.org.uk>
massoud alshareef wrote:
A few days ago I ran into a great tool for document wiki collaboration. It is called Confluence< http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/tour/?gclid=CN7t1ZO3l6gCFY0jfAo...
from Altassian. It provides an Open Source software license< http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/opensource-license-request.jsp when used with OSS products like Koha. [...]
Confluence is a terrible tool and its marketing seems to have mislead you, because that is not an Open Source software licence. It is a cost-free proprietary licence they grant if you use Confluence to work on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). They give you a licence and seem to add adverts to the bottom of every page, which I guess helps to promote their non-FOSS product to FOSS users.
Also, by using Confluence, you are locking out potential collaborators who care about freedom and helping Atlassian Pty Ltd to replace open project communities. Please, I beg you to move your work to a FOSS wiki as soon as reasonably possible.
Hope that explains, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. http://koha-community.org supporter, web and LMS developer, statistician. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for Koha work http://www.software.coop/products/koha