General questions about foreign communities and PAM future

First off, welcome to our community, Pierre-Yves. Or rather, let me re-welcome you

As for language support, we've been making strides in that area over the past year. Let me start off with the apps. You've probably noticed that Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird are available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. We'll be ramping that up to include just about every language that Mozilla supports over the next couple months now that our build process has been automated. OpenOffice.org Portable is also available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. And we plan to continue working on the other languages that OpenOffice.org supports as well. The other apps we make available, most are multilingual covering our core set of 6 supported languages as well as others.

On the Platform side, we currently support 33 languages built-in and we'll be adding a few more that have been submitted to later releases.

The one sticking point with the multilingual apps and the platform is the installer and the launchers as they are currently in English. With Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird and OpenOffice.org, we bundle only one language, so we set the launcher and installer to English. But they don't support multiple languages yet, so they're set to English for the other apps (which makes sense since most of our users speak English). That will be changing in the near future as the final release of the PortableApps.com Installer will support multiple languages which you can select at installer compile time. The launchers will do the same.

As for languages on the website, we were awaiting the Drupal 6 upgrade (our content management system) before even fully exploring it due to shortcomings in Durpal 5's multilingual support. With Drupal 6 and a few modules that I have in testing, it looks like we'll be able to support as many languages as we'd like. We started some work on it the old way with our German site as well as our German support forum. You'll find translations of most pages on it from Simeon and Marko. It's imperfect, though, as you'll note that it doesn't include the websites interface. We'll be able to do that shortly, too. But I didn't want to start rolling more languages out until we finalize it so that when we start welcoming our French users, for instance, they can get the whole site, interface, signup in their native tongue and be able to get French support in the forums. Once we're there, we'll be adding translators for each language who will have permission to edit the translation pages just like Marko and Simeon can for the German pages. We'd love to have you on board for that, if you're interested.

The roadmap for PAM... which we now call the PortableApps.com Platform... has been a bit slow to unfold. A number of things are being added, but I haven't made any roadmap public because I always get yelled at when I miss it. But I'm finally to a point where I'll be making the first test release available. I should have Alpha 1 up by end of the day on Monday. Not all the features are live yet but, when complete, the next release includes all the expected features (rename, hide, move to top/bottom, categorize, autorun, eject that closes apps running, customizable folders, etc) as well as a built-in updater for the apps and platform and a few other handy features. The ability to browse and add apps ala Synaptic/Adept will be coming but may not make it to this release as we still need to hash out how to handle multiple languages for download descriptions, screenshots, etc.

As for forks, that can become a good or a bad thing and has been both. A number of sites have made modifications to our software and redistributed it following the GPL, which is just fine. A number of sites have also made modifications to our packages like Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition and redistributed them, which is an issue as our licensing agreement with Mozilla does not extend to 3rd parties, so they're currently violating Mozilla's trademarks (3rd parties can, of course, redistribute our unaltered binary installers or completely modify it all to remove Mozilla's trademarks... just like regular Mozilla Firefox). Some other sites have actually redistributed our work and stripped off our code, copyright and trademark, which is, of course, a violation of the GPL (I'm still debating what to do about that). Some others have modified our packages and kept our name intact but the packages have had issues and folks have come here looking for help.

I also wanted to address something you'd brought up in the other topic. That of PortableApps.com staying free. One of the reasons I've licensed all my own original work under the GPL is that I'm a big believer in open source. I think PortableApps.com has been a great way to promote open source to a whole new set of users. But I'm also practical. I realize that closed source (whether paid or free) also fills needs for millions of people that open source hasn't. That's why I'm going to keep the Platform GPL but allow exceptions in certain instances. For example, the hardware company that has an encryption chip on their drive and the code to access it is closed and licensed from a 3rd party. Do we want to say open source it or go away and have them go to a U3 or a Microsoft or bundle yet another closed portable solution and have another drive with an open source-hostile platform on it? Or do we allow an exception for their bundle and keep the platform open but allow it to work with their system?

The same applies to the installer, which I've also written and released under the GPL. Do we say open source your app or go away? Or do we say yes, you can use it for your GPL-incompatible open source app, your freeware app and your payware app so that we can encourage all of those to be a part of an open platform?

So, the answer, in my opinion, is that we keep it open source (under the GPL when possible) but allow it to be used in some non-open source ways. This maximizes who can use it and benefit from it without limiting the open nature of it. I want to ensure a few things, personally... that it remains open source, that it always remains free for users and can't suddenly disappear the way freeware can and that it's around for a good long time to do many things (act as a central resource, help highlight deserving open source software, help fund future development of the platform and the apps as well as open source software in general, etc) and, ultimately, help make people's lives easier/better in some small way.

I guess the end answer to all your questions is that, yes, we'd love to have you more involved. As a French translator for the site, for the apps, as a developer of apps, as a developer for the platform, as a moderator in the French forum or whatever else that would fit.

Kind Regards,
John