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