If these 3 are fullfilled, I do not see any reason for it not to ship.

What I asked for was beta status, a motivation point for the translators.

Instead we got a group that didn’t do anything in over 3 years, cooked up some translations so they could block our effort and maintain their hegemony as the translation team for Swahili @ Mozilla. That’s everything they care about: Titles!

I feel personal indignation by this fact. I have put a lot of work, effort and love in this project!

You guys @ Mozilla are just doing your job, I know and you are doing what you think is right, based in your previous experience.

What I want you to see is that some times you have to be critical, and be so based in facts. Consult anyone that has endorsed our work and you will see that we are serious about this. We want this done because we believe it’s important in its own right, not because we want to have a mention in the contributors logs.

I appreciate both your ans Seth’s time. Hopefully this exchange of ideas and arguments has certainly enriched our vision on how communities work and that there are lots of differences that have to be worked out.

Now let’s focus our energy towards getting the translation done and accepted, not just get done with it being stalled.

I will be publishing links to the latest translation build soon.

The political game is a fact here. The Kilinux team is virtually blocking the translation done by the Umoja team. A prove to this is the fact that they did not do any actual translation work before we started our effort, and they had over 3 years to do so!

After contacting you, Umoja even proposed cooperation between both groups but that did not get us to any concrete results. I am not saying you are playing politics, I mean that you are, whether your are or not aware of it, part of a political game here.

But I do not criticize if I am not trying to give constructive feedback. I believe both teams can work it out, as long as overreacting people (like myself) keep out!

So, I will not change this post, but use the experience as a case for a blog series I am working on about “how can normal users contribute to the Free Software ecosystem” and go through this experience objectively.

Thanks for taking your time to answer and let’s look forward towards a unified translation (Umoja noun 11/- Root -moja 1 unity, oneness 2 singular 3 harmony 4 alliance, association)

We want to move forward and make it possible, but the assumptions you build here (such as that what block us is “politics”) are just plain wrong and unfair.
If you have any reason to ask yourself why we don’t find your localization ready yet, I’m pretty sure you can find more in Seth’s post: http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/2009/07/02/response-to-a-swahili-localization-enthusiast/

We ship Firefox now in 75 locales. We are not in the business of playing games. It’s about scaling our localization communities in the most sustainable way possible AND providing an excellent finished product.

But, as you can see through the comments in this post, you’ve planted the seed that our team at Mozilla is doing something dubious. We are not and that’s irresponsible on your part since you do not mention the full story in your post. Exactly what do you mean by “The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!”?

Here are the facts and consider rewriting your post:

We do have two language packs from the two teams with thousands of differences. With those two language packs, my team prepared a presentation of grammatical and translation differences between the two versions and reached out to many different linguistic professors who have expertise in East African Language Studies. One was eager to help and we are trying to get a final evaluation from him since he wants to get sw-TZ users a version of Firefox. Another academic contact requested tens of thousands of dollars to do the evaluation and we cannot fund that since no other locale has been afforded any funding to help settle disputes. A final academic contact did a rough evaluation, said that both translations contained many errors, he wouldn’t be comfortable with either, and would need to charge Mozilla a fee for him to do the thorough evaluation. These responses come from department heads at leading universities.

Playing politics would be something less prudent.

Please also keep in mind that we have several things going on right now, not the least of which is shipping Firefox to 75 locales to our 300+ million users who want updates to Firefox 3.5. In addition, we are actively working with many other new locales who want to participate. Yes, sw-TZ has been trying to localize Firefox for many years now. But, we are responding to requests from all over the world and do our best to manage it all and have done fairly well since we have scaled to 75 localizations. Most importantly, we want our end users to have something that is an excellent finished product.

sw-TZ is unique because we have two translations asking to be the official one. We are seeking the most judicious result as possible because surely one team will be quite disappointed if their translation is not chosen. The team at Mozilla is the group who deals with the aftermath of that decision. And, not making a wise decision would only complicate things.

I’d ask for your patience and understanding as we come to a resolution. And, please minimize the flaming when you don’t have all the facts. Not sure how that helps.