English only, please

[Kevin Kinsey]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

>On Sunday, 15 January 2006 at 16:49:27 -0600, Don Hinton wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi Greg:
>>
>>    
>>
<snipped>

>>Where exactly does it say that this is an "english only" list?
>>    
>>
>
>I suppose you have a point.  It's implicit; it should be spelt out.
>At http://www.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html you have a
>choice of "Mailing Lists" or "Non-English Mailing Lists".  -questions
>is under the former link; the Polish mailing lists are under the
>latter.  At
>http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-questions/
>there's a reference to an inability to speak English.  But we should
>really do something about writing a charter that makes it clear.
>Anybody feel like having a go?
>
>Greg
>

A "virtual friend" of mine (Kiwi, but don't really know his name)
has written this for a programming forum I frequent:

" To those people for whom English is a foreign language, I can
only offer this: English is - for better or worse - the /de facto/ 
/lingua Terra/.
Accidents of history (the British Empire, the U.S. free market) have
made English the standard language for international communication.
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, of course, and
it /is/ nice to have a common language. But I can tell you that I'd rather
try and read something that has been run through a babelfish translator
(like those at Altavista and Google) than some of the verbal sewage
that some native English speakers seem to think is acceptable."

I suppose I could ask him if his quote is BSD-licensed, or compatible. ;-)

KDK

-- 
A well-known friend is a treasure.