Report on the first FROST meeting

Wycliffe Raamatunkääntäjät (Wycliffe Bible Translators) of Finland have recently founded a department for sofware production and called it FROST. The goal is to make (or at this phase enhance existing) software which can aid in Bible translation work. In practice it means the same thing which SIL does and actually the existing software is SIL software. The more specific goal is to write software which is Open Source and works with Linux and Mac. The work is mostly volunteer based at least now.

Someone in SIL - (Doug Rintoul perhaps?) is responsible of giving my name in a conference in Canada and the Finnish representative contacted me asking if I would be interested. I answered positively and on 2007-11-10 I was in Tampere, Finland in the first meeting. There were about ten men, from professor emeritus to student, linguists and IT workers.

We gave presentations of our responsibilities which had been given to us. I am working with LexTools, though I have not done much about it yet. The more interesting :) part of my presentation was the Sword Project and BibleTime. It is already known that Wycliffe has been transforming a lot of material (about 400 translations and commentaries for their internal use) into the Sword format. Some piece of their software uses BibleTime as a "renderer". I have to investigate this further, I don't yet know the details. Anyways, people were interested about these projects.

It is interesting to see how the BibleTime [goals] and the goals of FROST can co-operate. The strategies/goals of FROST include:

• usability for the local people ("the rice farmer" they said)
  • the Wycliffe strategy is to take local people to do the work
• cross-platform
  • no MS vendor lock-in
  • Mac
  • Linux (especially Ubuntu which has been promoted by SIL)
  • and Windows also
• Open Source (in practice GPL)

On technical side there was - especially after the official part - discussion about programming languages and toolkits. Python has been promoted by SIL and they have recommended wxPython, but some of us disagreed a bit. I told about Qt and many programmers acknowlegde that there is no one right language but different tasks call for different tools. Generally speaking, however, only long-term, easy, well known, well supported etc. alternatives can be accepted. Together with the other strategies and with some other practical considerations it means mostly C(/C++) and Python.

Last but not least there was one person who was interested in BibleTime development. We will see where this leads to.

Eelik 14:52, 12 November 2007 (CET)