The fellowship meeting in Italy

[Stefano Maffulli]

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 17:06 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> Won't people instead be talking about "software libero"? Do Italians
> really see a lot of spam mentioning that?

Well, no the spam I personally get is mainly in English or asian
languages I don't recognize.  You're right that in proper Italian Free
Sw must be translated as Software Libero, but Italian is becoming
rapidly 'italianglish': we use regularly words like weekend, meeting,
business; not to mention the complete computer vocabulary that is pure
English (file, directory, hard disk, etc)  So for Italians it is more
normal to chose English when talking about computers and business (two
fields I know, probably it's the same in medicine and engineering).
This translates into a wide diffusion of the term 'open source' because
it's 1) English, 2) not to be confused with 'free software' as in spam
messages.  This lead to a very idiotic paradox: the recent laws and
documents from the government talk about 'Software a sorgente aperto', a
word-to-word translation of 'open source software'.  Stupid, but we
couldn't convince the people that Software Libero is what they really
meant to say.

cheers
stef