Proposal: donation to Weblate

Hello,

As you might have seen elsewhere on the forum, we have moved all our translations from Transifex to App translations moved to Weblate.

We (@ByteHamster, @femmdi and myself) love that this service is provided to us for free, from open source project to open source project. The developer-owner (Weblate is largely a one-man-show) is also very responsive on questions on GitHub, which we appreciate a lot.

Given their free and open source service (in this technical niche domain), we would like to propose a donation to Weblate of € 2.5k. This would fall under category 5 Upstream & Peer contributions of our Donations Expenses Policy.

We currently have almost € 7.5k in our Open Collective which we don’t really need for other investments or expenses. We think that this donation can have a substantial impact for Weblate.

Now, when we started to use Weblate for our website (longer ago) and when moving our app translations to Weblate (recently), we did run into a few things. We now have workarounds where needed, but it would be great if things could be improved a bit to assist our set-up. So, while a donation, we would try and work with Weblate to address some of these points. That is also a reason for proposing a considerable amount (even though still below the median pay for a developer in Prague).

Some of the points we'd love for Weblate to improve (click to open).
  • For each file there is one component. While Weblate directly supports markdown files (which we use for the website), importing them all would mean we have tens of components in Weblate. They can be grouped, but settings still need to be applied to all those components.
  • To mark users as reviewer, we need to create a team. Languages can only be set a team-level, not at user level. So if we want to allow user X to review French strings and allow user Y review Italian strings, we need two teams. In other words: we’d need one team per language, thus a lot of teams.
  • Contributor agreements can only be set at component level. As we’d like to set the same agreement across the project, we’d need to copy-paste the same text to all components. And then still, translators would have to accept the same text for each component.
  • There’s no way to post string comments via the API. Consequently, we don’t have a way to move existing string comments (feedback) from Transifex to Weblate (apart from copy-pasting).

As per our Donations Expense Policy, we’re putting this proposal to the community. Please drop a line below to let us know if you agree, have doubts, oppose, etc (or click the heart if you’re feeling lazy :wink: ).

If there are no objections by Wednesday 27th, we’ll reach out to Weblate to kick of the process.

5 Likes

I agree with the proposal. I assume we are making the donation with no strings attached. Even though we would love to have Weblate fix the features we want, it would still be up to the developer to decide.

2 Likes

That sounds like a lot to donate, but it also sounds like we highly value the service and support we receive. I would support the donation.

2 Likes

Yes, the idea is to try and ask them to address those things. But if they don’t want to, to still donate the money.

2 Likes