[Discuss] [hackerspaces] [Open Manufacturing] Problems with Open Source Ecology. A Perspective

Federico Lucifredi flucifredi at acm.org
Mon Jul 22 03:56:26 UTC 2013


On Jul 21, 2013, at 3:35 AM, Lisha Sterling <lishevita at gmail.com> wrote:

>  I remember a time when Amazon's code was built for the US market only and had to be beaten into submission to work in Europe and Japan. Not building internationalization into the system from the get go cost Amazon a ton of money.

That is doubtful. AMZN has to build warehouses and distribution centers to enter markets.  Even if that were not true, the ability to go to market faster that was enabled by not internationalizing from the start, not supporting section 501, etc is very likely to actually have made AMZN money.

> There are still startups making that same mistake today, but those with someone from somewhere other than the US who the management actually pay any attention to are far less likely to make that error. Even other English speaking countries need internationalization to deal with different date formats, different currency formats, etc.

I can appreciate your passion to be inclusive, but in most cases the decision not to localize in the first (or second, or third) version of a software project is made deliberately.  It is not driven by people not knowing what they are doing, it is driven by the costs and schedule stretch that is added by translating the strings (the common model is that the project goes to code freeze, then the strings are translated and any new string is forbidden).

I have worked on both localized and not localized projects. Not localizing, you can cut between one and three months from schedule.  The fact is, other things are being done during those three months (QA, Documentation, etc), and so the picture is more complex, and project-specific constraints drive the decision one way or another - real world projects don't have infinite unlimited resources, tradeoffs come in.

Best -F

_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C









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