In July of this year, WeLocalize launched the GlobalSight Open Source Initiative, offering the industry’s first open source version of enterprise translation management software. WeLocalize plans to release open source GlobalSight in January, 2009, and is committed to supporting LISA standards Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) and Segmentation Rules eXchange 2.0 (SRX). GlobalSight also recently announced a partnership with ClayTablet Technologies to enable connectivity with content management systems.
Is this just another marketing initiative searching for a way to differentiate common technology? Early indications are that there’s a real movement afoot. Over 200 people from 147 companies have joined this open source community, and the steering committee contains many high-tech leaders, including Cisco, EMC, IBM, Autodesk, NetApp, and Sun Microsystems. Sun, for example, has a long history of embracing open standards and open source. Sun has staked its future repeatedly on open standards and open sources, ranging from the early days of UNIX and Java to today’s OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, Java, and, now, Open Translation centering on XLIFF standards.
To be sure, this is an impressive list of companies. But the basis of these companies’ interest is not entirely clear, and the adoption history for open source solutions across the value chain of content technologies has been fragmented at best. Open source content management software is still in the early stages of acceptance and open source authoring software has yet to take significant market share.
In the end, global corporations and organizations determine value and standards. So we put the question to you: WOULD YOU CONSIDER ADOPTING OPEN SOURCE TRANSLATION, AND WHY? Please comment on this blog or send me email with your ideas. Let’s continue this conversation…