Oreon should switch to English as its primary language

[Leander]

Hi,

I'm just going to be blunt about this. I'm new to Oreon. I work for an internet hosting provider that manages a fairly large number of servers. Currently, we use Nagios for monitoring all of them. This works quite well. However, we miss having extensive easy-to-configure graphing and reporting features. Apparently, these features are offered by the Oreon project. Therefore, i did an installation of Oreon for testing purposes. Now, after playing around with Oreon for a while, I am starting to get more and more annoyed with the fact that the project apparently has decided that French is to be used as the primary language. Moreover, this may very well be the reaon for us to _not_ use Oreon after all.

Now, I'm a clever guy and I work with clever people, but my understanding of the French language just isn't what it used to be since I left highschool more than a decade ago...
For an "Open Source Solution Based on Nagios" that offers a "Revisited Experience Of Nagios" and "has a constantly growing communauty" (sic) which "has an outstanding involvement", I really think not having English as the primary language is a no-go. Some examples:

- The documentation that is referenced from the English version of the Oreon website is in French.
- The website itself seems to switch to the French language randomly.
- The French part of the forum has thousands of topics and views, whereas the english part has only a few hundred.

I could go on with this list of peeves, but I think you probably catch my drift by now.

All in all, I think this whole sticking to the French language is a big waste of resources and a huge missed opportunity for the Oreon project as a whole. I can only imagine how many potential Oreon users have been put off by the language barrier already.

If the Oreon project wants to get widespread adoption in the Nagios community, there is only one way forward. That is of course, by dropping the use of the French language and switching to English-only. The translation/localization support in the Oreon software itself seems to work quite well. I applied some improvements to the English translation with very little effort (see http://forum.oreon-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=2530). However, there is no imaginable way I (we) would/could be helping out on the development of Oreon any further in its current form and incarnation.

In the end, I think the Oreon project has some serious potential and could thrive with the support of the Nagios community, but I can't be sure, because I don't know what the fsck you guys are saying ;-)

Bien a vous,
Leander

[ts77]

sorry but you seem on the wrong track.

"dropping the use of the French language and switching to English-only"
is just mad. you can't tell someone to not use his native language if he wants to.
usually open-source developers develop something what they need for themselves and open it to the public later. and if they provide it in their native language thats their way to do this.
only the community can help to improvde the support in english.

you can long for better support in english but dropping french is the wrong way to go. just help them for supporting english the way you want it to be, e.g. with translating the parts you think that are important.

btw. I don't understand a word in french and had no (or better, not too many) problems to setup oreon. basic install instructions are in english in the manual.


thomas

[DonKiShoot]

For me, i haven't hard problem to use English but there is no reason why English should be the native language because Oreon was born French and i hope still be French with best International support next :wink:

[Leander]

Ok, let me try to clarify my statement a bit more and apologise if my post sounded a bit harsh :-)

First of all, when I say that Oreon needs to switch to English as its primary language, I mean this in the context of "external communication". Things like the website, the forum, the documentation etc. should all be readily (and primarily) available in English.

You should try to see this from the perspective of a potential new user, who hears about Oreon one way or another and decides to visit the site and maybe try out the software and who is, in all likelyhood, not French. In the end, it just boils down to sensible PR and marketing.

There is a lot of (open source) software available on the internet and part of what I do at my job is to sift through as many of these projects as I can, to try and find the best software for us to use (and for me to recommend to colleagues, clients and friends). When I first visit a project, I tend to assume that what the developers say their software does, is true.

The next thing to do is find out what the chances are that I can get it installed and working with as little effort as possible. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty, but as we all know: time is money. I also need to be sure that I can get some kind of help if I run into trouble installing and/or configuring the software. Now, let's see how that would work with Oreon...

The new user visits the website, which does start out in English. This is a good thing. However, there are bits of French text mixed in randomly throughout the site. Moreover, the website seems to randomly slip into French mode, while it's not always clear how to get back into English mode. The buttons on the top of the page are just not always there. This is a bad thing. For me, this was the starting point of a growing annoyance, which ultimately lead to my posting this thread to the forum.

Next, like I said before, the Oreon documentation that is linked from the English website is in French. That just plain sucks and probably scares away a significant part of all potential new users right off the bat. I decided to stick around a little longer, mainly because of the features that Oreon advertises.

Now, let's hope the software comes packaged with English documentation, or we're in trouble. The answer is yes and no. I downloaded the latest release. To sum up:

- one empty /doc folder
- a README that only refers to the INSTALL file for more information
- an INSTALL file with a requirements lists, which turns out to be largely incomplete, and furthermore containing only an instruction to just run ./install.sh

So I'm basically left with nothing but the hope that this magical install.sh will work as promised and that this is all I will have to do to get up and running, or, in any other case, that the installer will tell me what to do next. That's a lot of ifs....

Next thing on the list is to find out how and where to get support. Hmmmm, no mailing lists? Strange....
But wait, there's a forum! To sum up the forum, with the help of some statistics:

- French forum: 2000 topics, 15000 Posts
- English forum: 300 topics, 1400 posts

These numbers tell me a lot about Oreon. There are either practically no English-speaking users, or almost every Oreon user speaks French well enough to post messages in the French forum, even the non-French users. I find the latter hard to believe. Either way, as someone who does not speak French very well, it seems that I'm likely to get about 90% less attention than a French speaking user does. To put it another way: I'm 90% fscked and running out of options.

By this time, I, as a potential new user, will probably have decided to not use Oreon and I haven't even tried it out yet! I feel left out, ignored and thinking the Oreon developers just don't care if their software is used by anyone outside of France (and Canada maybe). Surely this can not be their intention? The number of Nagios implementations in the world is sheer endless. Surely the Oreon developers would like nothing better than to have each of these Nagios installations managed by Oreon?
Let's face it: this is never going to happen unless the Oreon project shifts its attention, because English is the de facto standard in (open source) software development and support.

Like I said before: I think Oreon has a lot of potential as a replacement for the configuration nightmare that is Nagios, while also adding features like graphing and reporting. I'm not saying all these things just to piss you off. I hope you take my remarks into consideration; they are meant well. It would be a shame if this project did not get the attention it deserves because of something as silly as this.

[DonKiShoot]

Not easy for me to understand everything but i guess and agree that there is many bug in translation on the Oreon website (still in French except the "news" windows :? ).
The website need just more attention (Julio, Romain, it's for you :wink: ).
But if anyone could swap between English or French with success then all is OK.
There is no reason why first langage should be English.
It's not hard to click on prefered country flag.
This small difficulty for the new users to click on this "prefered country flag" may be used to secure us from newbees :lol:

All that I can say to you with certainty, is that there is a problem with documentation and that the developpement team is currently working on it.
But they prefer, and us too, to make coding instead of making documentation.
At every new version, there is a lot of new fonctionnality and it's hard for this little team to maintain an official documentation.
All documentation present is made by people who want to help dev team.

Just remember that Oreon's Team is composed of approximately 5 people who work when they can on Oreon.

Hope i answer your questions.
Perhaps an official developpement Team member could supplement my explanation :wink:

[maarten]

The common language in programming is English. It's almost impossible to avoid using English terminology when talking on a technical level about software development, system management or programming. All programming languages I know use English for all kinds of language constructs, not Chinese, German, French or Swahili. Databases use SQL and DDL based on English language.

Considering this I think, especially when giving a project to the open source community, development and innovation can benefit a lot from using English as the core language.

[DonKiShoot]

Everybody know that :wink:

Maybe in a better world

But English is not their native language, which would require an additional intellectual effort of them that they do not have time to make, I think.

As i know, there is no english developper who help them.
Is it the time for that ? I think it is :wink:

[Daniel.Sloan]

I'm working on documentation right now, and posting it at my website.
Initially just simple things like my own experiences with Oreon, and a little "Getting Started Guide" (7 pages already and I'm not even past "Installation" hehehe). I won't post a link yet as I'm still developing the guide, but rest assured a link will appear in the forum soon.

In any case, I choose not to post a vote on the poll, because I believe there is no reason either language needs to be "primary". From what I have seen the developers have made impressive efforts to keep the code in a format that is at least fairly intelligible to english speakers (comments are usually in english, most function names and variables tend to be english or at least partly english). Clearly their businessis going to be French-oriented, and given this product has a commercial support arm they are likely to have a strong French user base.
That having been said, I agree - you guys really need a native-english speaker or two to help out. I'm more than happy to offer any support I can - I've got experience as a PHP developer, network engineer, and (english :wink documentation writer. Please feel free to throw any documentation requests my way and I'll do my best to develop something. I've also got plenty of experience with Joomla and Mambo and am more than happy to do my best to help get the site working more smoothly for English browsers.

Oh and by the way - really nice product guys :-) Still some improvements to come in interface design but you really seem to have the right idea! Can't wait for a PHP-WeatherMap style feature :wink:

Regards,
Daniel.

[julio]

hi daniel,

If you want to help us, we are enjoyed... it's great. We need english people to translate oreon, to tranlate our web site, our documentation on the wiki.

If you have also joola knwoledge it's ok, we can create admin account to create some documentation, faq on our web site.

If your are ok, contact me at [email protected]

thanks in advance

[Bob Farrell]

English Docs

Yes,
I am in need of some English documentation as well. I have the product 95% installed, but still cannot use it due to some problems I have. ( I have posted them in the forum.

Thanks
Bob

[Daniel.Sloan]

Events have conspired against me for the past month, however I am still here and starting work on this again now.
I hope to post a link to some doco within the next week, even if its not finished (I'd post it now, but at the moment its just embarrassing, so I want to clean it up and make it presentable first).
It'll mostly just be a "Getting Started" guide at this stage, but I hope that will be of help to people.

[hypatia]

I'm an English speaker who knows no French. While I admit that the lack of good English documentation, combined with the difficulty finding any up t0 date English documentation, has made my life a bit harder, I think it's unrealistic to ask the lead developers to switch languages for my sake.

It's up to us English speaking users to provide the high quality English documentation and support to enable Oreon to take off. The fact that the English documentation is inconsistent and obsolete, does make Oreon appear to be an immature project.

I installed Oreon while my employer was searching for a commercial solution. I could not try to sell the use of Oreon/Nagios to my boss by showing him the website and documentation. I had to set it up, get it working, and demonstrate what it could do.

It is up to Oreon's English speaking community to "market" and "support" it for English speakers.

[barbaar]

My opinion is required here

My first thought is that some are forgetting we are using Open Source software. Which means "if you don't like it, change it" and "all support is welcome, as long as it's good".

I think Oreon admins clearly show help is appreciated.

Nowadays there are enough tools to bypass a language problem (translate.google.com for example). Translate the pages that you think are useful and don't hesitate posting in them in English. I have done that several times, and I don't think that was a problem

[julio]

I'm agree with but we need to do more things in english. I think to be bigger, oreon have to be more english

sorry for my english.