LISA: Is the decision to Open Source ForeignDesk a statement about the localization tool sector, or an attempt to shake up the industry as a whole?

Jonathan Clark: Our decision is based on a combination of what our customers want, and more strategically, how technology can help us improve globalization, internationalization and localization work and get return on investment.

For some time now, our CEO Rory Cowan has been talking about what he calls the technology S-curve. This curve is a model showing that what started out as complex services over time becomes software products, and ultimately these products are distilled into features of a more general software package.

This happened for example in the DTP field, which started out as a professional service. This service was transformed into the dedicated QuarkXpress product, and later arrived as a feature of desktop platforms such as MS Office. Similarly, we feel that, in the case of computer-aided translation tools, the technology had become 'featurized' and therefore no longer offered us a competitive advantage and no longer provided our customers an appropriate return on investment.

When we began with ForeignDesk, we found that existing solutions were too primitive to do what we needed. We reckoned we could create new features for these products that delivered an almost immediate return on investment. Over the years, everyone who produced a translation memory tool ended up with similar feature sets, suggesting that the S curve was happening. Our policy has always been to only develop when off-the-shelf products fail in some way. So we wondered what we could do with this featurized technology, and opted for the Open Source solution.

We are not alone in reacting this way. Even Trados is offering an SDK and encouraging organizations to develop TM as a feature of a greater platform. And a broader range of companies are seeking ways of adding localization components to their business process systems. So others have also realized that the technology has reached the featurization stage of the S-curve. After all, how many more desktop licenses can TM suppliers sell?

It might be worth clarifying that we have never tried to compete head-on with Trados. They are mainly focused on the MS Word style plug-in environment, and obviously have more new features, since TMs are their core business. ForeignDesk offers a different feature set, since it is primarily focused on the translation of mark-up formats, software and customer proprietary formats.

LISA: How can Open Source ForeignDesk help the language tools and technology industry?

Jonathan Clark: One of our real motivations was to push organizations that produce technology to differentiate more. If you look at the feature sets of the off-the-shelf tools, they are very similar to what they were 3 or 4 years ago, yet the cost of the tools continues to rise despite the fact that core features haven't changed. So we are hoping that our gesture will push the people wishing to produce off-the-shelf tools to differentiate them from what is available at no cost in the Open Source community.

The most compelling feature of Open Source is the source code. Obviously we are not saying that ForeignDesk is the ultimate TM environment. What we are saying is that for some organizations, an Open Source ForeignDesk can help since it has better features per cost than any other product—after all it is free.

Some of our customers use proprietary file formats, which means that an Open Source version would enable them to customize translation memory tools more easily.

For others, ForeignDesk can act as a "sandbox" enabling industry plays to test out new technologies at lower cost and risk, before off-the-shelf products can start supporting these new features. For example, Foreign Desk offers native support for .NET software. We used the platform for a cutting-edge technology application; now we can encourage the off-the-shelf industry to catch up, and decide on the ROI of these applications.

But the technology could also help in testing industry standards. Since it supports XML, Foreign Desk could be used to prototype implementations of XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format, a standards project in which we participate) or be used as an XLIFF editor. In other words, new standards could be tested by the community at large on a real platform instead of testing their theories in an isolated case.

LISA: Will the community be able to support ForeignDesk?

Jonathan Clark: We have set up an environment for peer-to-peer support, which takes full advantage of the uniqueness of the web. Most TM packages available today, offer similar support channels. We will certainly offer specialized support where it is needed, but obviously we cannot do this at no cost.

To get the ball rolling and find out what the community thinks, we did a mailing to a few hundred individuals and the attraction has picked up considerably. About 2000 downloads of the software from the website have been logged in just a few weeks. We have even had individuals offering to participate in the development community by localizing the software for free.

It's worth noting that we've received 100 or more emails from translators and vendors thanking us for our move. To them it is positive feedback, since they now have more options. People are offering to participate by adding their own features. If a community develops, they could offer data testing, or documentation writing services.

LISA: Open Source offers a number of licensing options for users and developers. Which have you chosen?.

Jonathan Clark: We opted for BSD as the most effective, since it allows individuals the choice of participating, creating derivative works and then selling them, and either keeping or providing the modified source code. The others were less flexible—Mozilla requires that any derivative works be submitted to the committee responsible for the product. And the GNU license pushes for free software and requires that any derivative works are Open Sourced as well.

The community that we officially sponsor is the SourceForge community that is hosted remotely. Their mission is to promote Open Source projects, and they have about 30,000 products available at the moment. This is the first time the localization community has been involved in an Open Source action.

LISA: Now you no longer have to support ForeignDesk, where do you want to spend your technology budget?

Jonathan Clark: Following our S-curve type thinking, we feel that much of the functionality of the traditional globalization management systems (GMS) are becoming features of content management systems (CMS). Previously, CMS platforms did not enable multilingual content structures. So the first versions of GMS technologies were simply storehouses for multibyte content accessible via a browser from a web server. By 2000, these technologies were storing multilingual content, in separate language repositories, so the GMS and CMS technologies were overlapping. These days, a lot of the automation and storage of multilingual content, syndication of multilingual content and the global, local and regional relationships between source and target, or locally authored content, is now part of off-the-shelf CMSs. So GMS suppliers such as GlobalSight and Idiom are now trying to differentiate themselves by emphasizing language tool functionality.

We have therefore decided to focus our technology strategy around business process automation (how we can lower the cost of executing work), and how to integrate our process and technologies into the systems our customers might deploy. For example, if our customers deploy a CMS such as Documentum, our organization wants to participate in that workflow in the same way as the source authors.

As part of our technology-driven services, we automate certain tasks while still participating in the source workflow, rather than first taking the content out of the client's system, working on it and then putting it back later. It can be more efficient to participate with our customers as an extension of their existing business. So our technology acts as a needs-based platform, which enables us to be more efficient or generate higher quality for our customers.

Jonathan Clark (Jonathan_Clark@lionbridge.com)is responsible for setting direction for the architecture, design and development of Lionbridge's technology initiatives. As the original architect of the Lionbridge Globalization Platform (LGP), Jonathan also oversees the development of new LGP functionality and its integration with other software platforms. He is actively involved in the Microsoft .NET initiative, and driving Lionbridge involvement in open source and emerging standards that will impact the globalization market. He also authored ForeignDesk, the localization industry's first TCP/IP multi-user translation memory technology. Jonathan holds patents for technologies related to real time reuse of multilingual content and multilingual content alignment.