French version of this site ...

[Lord_Coder]

Hi all,

it will be interesting if this site will be also in french , french developpers are counting by thousands , so the number of your visitors will increase !
And there's no web site in french related to os developpement !
What do you think admin ?

[Cheery]

I don't know, It'd be nice if this site would be in french and finnish too, but it'd mean I'd need to learn french before I could get along talking with the french people of this forum. And other people would require need to learn finnish to talk with me... I do think having one language of choice is nice thing, even it wouldn't be an universal language. (as english isn't very good in being universal language. Even many people talks it, they develope very different dialects from it, which causes that language having effect not being universal but whole set of new languages.)

[Solar]

Hm... I, for one, consider it a bad thing when a resource site like this one splits up into multiple native languages. What that ends up at is that your chances of actually finding the info you are looking for by searching decrease sharply, as does the number of visitors per board.

Cheery, are French developers so bad at English that they can't use this board as it is? Past headcounts found that about half of the people here isn't native English speakers anyway...

[Lord_Coder]

Split this site into many languages ?
No .
The admin can simply create a "International" category on the board .
The translation of the osfaq can wait .
If you dont know the number of french developpers of the world , look at developpez.com , the best award wining french developpers community , their number is actually 108 408 , developpez's admin loves sites who's want to be parteners , so mega-tokyo and developpez can be parteners , they can exchange links and win PR ( pagerank ) , and so , mega-tokyo can rank better on Google's search result ( and other search engines ) .

PS : YaBBC is a bad forum board script , choose punbb or phpbb !

[Eero Ränik]

Developers in most countries can be counted in thousands too, but I think there is no need for splitting the board or even creating an International category. Most of the advanced programming needs at least a basic knowledge of English anyway, since even such a big language as French hasn't got nearly enough information written in or translated to it.

I can't somehow believe that the user count of the forums of developpez.com actually can be used to count French developers. One can't expect every single one of them to have registered, and if it should indeed be so, why would we need to create another set of forums here?

Why is YaBB SE necessarily a bad forum software? It has all the features we need, and I believe that, security-wise, YABB SE boards are without any bigger security holes and they are targeted less by scripters trying to abuse them, simply because there are about a hundred times less YaBB SE boards than there are, say, phpBB boards.

[Kemp]

I agree with keeping the boards how they are. Any alternate language posts would be read by a lot less people and thus the information wouldn't be shared and they might as well be on another board somewhere else. Also agreed that any serious developer would need to know english first anyway as virtually all documentation for hardware and suchlike is published in english primarily and other languages as an after-thought (if at all).

[chasetec]

I've often wondered about this.....

Here in the US compared to the rest of the world, very few people speak a second language(on average). Because of this I think at least US based os developers wouldn't visit foreign language boards. However as osdev forums dedicated to other languages appear isn't it likely that the bilingual posts are going to disappear as the bilingual posters start only visiting a native lanuage board? Wouldn't a native foriegn language forum be a way to attract more bilingual posters?

Of course it'd make cross-posting and moderation a royal pain

[Lord_Coder]

Why is YaBB SE necessarily a bad forum software?

Because its slower than PunBB and discontinued .

[Lord_Coder]

And i agree that anyone must learn english before entering into the programming world .

[Solar]

Well... I'd daresay there are more developers speaking German as native language than there are French speaking ones. Yet, with quite some experience surfing the web for technical information accumulated in the last 15 years (yes, there was a web before Mosaic appeared!), I found that native-language boards are almost always inferor to the English ones. The language of the software world is English, no way around it, and I don't consider it a drawback to communicate in one language.

And as for the other points... I don't really care for Google rankings or "partnerships" that much. This board stands out for (still) having an excellent signal / noise ratio, and some very knowledgeable people attending here. However, there are always periods where increased influx of newbies threatens to drown the board in another round of "can't I write my OS in HTML" or "I want to write a kernel, but what is this 'compiler' thingy?"

We always recovered, and in the process added a couple more "regulars" to the board. But I am not too sure whether we should strife for a yet higher profile, because I am afraid that there is a "breaking point" somewhere down the line where the "regulars" and "veterans" become disenchanted and leave the board to the newbies.

I don't know that French board you talked about (because my French honestly sucks), so I can't judge the quality of its average attendant. But as for this board, I think we're quite fine just as we are, and my vote would be to not change a thing.

[bubach]

Using english also helps keeping some sort of age-limit, to keep the number of "I want to program in Javascript" posts down..

[Pype.Clicker]

wouldn't be much interested in a french version either, even if i'm native french speaker. The less there are board to review, the most likely you'll see me posting... Yet, a "LiensMalins" page on the OSFAQ for french-written useful links would be a good idea ... i mean, sometimes you find something _really_ interesting and it's in french (like the sos.enix.org articles) ... you know 95% of the posters here won't be interested, but still that's a good link for the 5% that prefer reading french than english ...

[Solar]

Oh, I can think of some German-only links (or books) that would be nice to add, too... looks like there is an idea.

[Kemp]

I can definately see that as a good idea, given that most docs are in english I'd imagine it would be incredibly useful to collect together links to ones in other languages.

[chasetec]

Actually I started collecting foreign-language osdev links last week after having some discussions with a few of the sysbin people(russian). It's a little russian heavy at the moment and I have to talk some more with developers that speak russian to seperate out the osdev sites from the individual os projects. If anyone knows of any french, german, or any other language osdev sites I'll be more then happy to add them.

http://www.osdev.org/wiki/index.php/Resources