Opensource contribution always pays..even if a couple of years after
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008Someday two years ago I submitted a translation for an opensource project, gmail-notifier. It is a very nice notifier for Gmail accounts written in Python. I never received a response from the authors , neither I saw my translation appear in the project source, which seemed to be dead.
It was my first attempt to actively help a free software project, and I also felt demoralized because of the absent feedback.
Today I surprisingly noticed that the project is active again, and the authors cited my work and also included my translation in the source code. They "forced" me to forgive them because they released this version just for including the translations! They even published the list of the translators on their home page, telling:
In the last two years many people have contributed with the project by sending to me translations that I have never posted. The development of Gmail Notifier 1.7 is now starting, so I'm releasing this version just to include those translations and to say thank you to all the people that have supported the project.
The new translations are:
- Svenska
- Italiano (Daniel Graziotin)
- Nederlands (Dennis van der Staal)
- Deutsch (Marc Philipp, Eric Franco)
-Portuguese (Brazil) (Yguaratã C. Cavalcanti)
- Français (Thibault Martin-Lagardette)
- Czech (Václav Cermák)
- Russian (Aleksandr Chekanov)
- Polish
- Latvian (Kaspars Krampis)
- Esperanto (Abel Johannes)
- Arabic (Youssef Chahibi)
- Japanese (Satoshi Tanabe)
I took a screenshot as memory
They also included some thanks in the sourcecode.
A contribute to opensource projects is really rewarding, even if your work consists in modifying a handful of XML lines.
If you've got the time to do it, then make it!
I wish good luck to gmail-notifier team for the development of the 1.7 release, which will be written from scratch. I wish I had the time to contribute to the sourcecode, too, now that I'm able to handle some Python, but I believe I will help them to translate the program in Italian again 
