Dear Dr. Siewicz, Thanks for your resourceful reply to our inquiry! We are happy to offer more details to ease your concerns. As an IP lawyer practiced for years in China, I fully agree that any legal text/license shall always be interpreted and enforced in line with its original text, no more and no less. But as you are certainly aware, understanding and applying copyleft licenses could be very complicate and we already witnessed some unsatisfactory translation in local community and litigation proceedings. So the Contransus project aims only to provide a publicly-available and credible translation as an option, not as a substitution or the only official translation of any original license, although we do involve competent bilingual experts/professionals to review and revise the translations. In terms of legal practice, it is long-established in Chinese judicial system that any written material in foreign language submitted to court shall be accompanied by its Chinese translation; and in case any party disputes the accuracy of such translation, a translation agency would be appointed, either by the parties jointly or by the court if the parties cannot agree upon such agency (see enclosed "FYR", containing relevant extracts from legislation with AI translation). That is to say, a Chinese translation is always necessary before court and any party involved always has a chance to dispute for a more- agreeable tranlation in their specific case. A published translation could be a good choice/reference anyway. We do appreiciate and respect FSF's prudence in not approving official translation (as stated on GNU website) and we would of cause ensure our translation is published with the proper disclaimer message as required by FSF. Nevertheless, we hope to be considered as an updated version of Simplified Chinese translation, while there are some obvious mistakes in the version linked by FSF (e.g. "Foundation" in the term FSF is translated into two different words in Chinese, one is for "foundation" and the other is for "alliance" ). We could understand FSF's standing of not giving legal advice, though we view the questions we raised as purely literal. And if it is not viable for FSF to give any instruction thereof, we would try to seek and consult with more experts to ascertain appropriate meaning. If FSF has any expert recommandation in this regard, please feel free to let us know. While our foundation is registered as "open source foundation", we admire and agree that "freedom" is at core and of important moral values. To promote better understanding of the GPL licenses and the values of free software, we are more than happy to collect and translate more related materials in our Contransus project [one planned material is "Copyleft and the GNU GPL A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide (updated 2018)"; and we would add the article https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html]. Please let us know if you have any more suggested/recommanded materials. We are also open to discussion on potential collaboration with FSF, which would be our honor and pleasure. Warm regards, Lotus From: Krzysztof Siewicz via RT Date: 2023-11-08 19:03 To: vanessa Subject: [gnu.org #1985209] [inquiry] Questions about several articles of GPLv3 Hello, On Wed Oct 18 04:59:08 2023, vanessa(a)openatom.org wrote: Thanks for writing in and for your interest in the FSF's GNU General Public Licenses. We generally like the idea of bringing consensus about free software licensing and we admire your effort to bring more understanding about the GNU GPLv3 to non-English speaking people. We will try to help, but our resources are limited. We also think there are important caveats for such a translation project. As you are most certainly aware, licenses are legal text applied ultimately by courts. Presenting a court with a translation brings yet another layer to the already complicated problems of license application. Therefore, the FSF has never approved a translation of our licenses as official, for reasons stated in: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html.en On that page we link to some unofficial translations, which include Chinese translations, that you might want to check. Would you be so kind and explain more how do you want to handle legal issues resulting from the existence of a published translation of the GNU GPLv3? Can you elaborate more on the message you plan to accompany your translation with? The FSF does not give legal advice. We believe that the best way to answer your questions would be to ask a lawyer active in a jurisdiction for which you want to have a resolution of those issues. From our side, we can share educational materials covering our intention, rationale, and interpretation of the licenses, such as https://gplv3.fsf.org/ or https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html.en Additionally, after reading your e-mail and reviewing your website (English version), we would like to kindly draw your attention to the fact that although the terms "open source" and "free software" denote almost the same set of computer programs, they mean different things. We discourage the use of the term "open source" for reasons stated, for example, in: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses- the-point.en.html We would like ask you to be mindful of the moral message you communicate in your publications, including the translations that you work on, apart from considering all legal implications that follow from publishing a translation of licenses. -- Best, Krzysztof Siewicz | Licensing and Compliance Manager, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: 6DC9 E663 36DB 9588 81AB 7E43 2671 24EF FC9C D84E https://fsf.org Submit your session for LibrePlanet 2024: https://u.fsf.org/40g US government employee? Use CFC charity code 63210 to support us through the Combined Federal Campaign. https://cfcgiving.opm.gov/