And if you didn't know yet, you should be reading Planet Debian, to find out that I, once considered a nice member of the Free Software community, have succumbed to the dark forces that threaten the pureness of our hackers.

In reply to my post about my visit to London, Beowulf blogged about the dubious convenience of me participating in a "non-free" project as The Launchpad. Yeah, Rosetta's code isn't available at all. Is that enough reason to bash it non-stop? Is Canonical expected to release everything they do from day one, or can they decide what is more convient for them in order to build a profitable business and continue contributing to Debian and Free Software?

Beowulf, you work for a construction company or something similar, right? Are the specs of the projects they are working on freely available as open content in the Internet? Does that make you feel bad?

As far as I know, you use the Linux kernel in all or most of your computers. Maybe you should consider *BSD or even the Hurd, as, unlike Linux, they don't use a non-free tool like bitkeeper to manage their development.

If I'm helping the Rosetta people with the constructive feedback I can provide, it is because I think it's going to be a Good Thing for the i18n communities in which I'm involved. If Mark told me Rosetta will never be free, I guess I would focus on helping similar projects like Pootle, which are Free today, but the thing is that Canonical does plan to release Rosetta and the rest of Launchad under a DFSG-free licence. They will do it when the company is ready to give it away, and I will happily contribute while this happens, because I believe that Rosetta has a potential to be a revolutionary tool for Free Software l10n, specially for language teams that don't have already established translation teams like many African or Asian languages.