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Variety of contribution

The OmegaT project philosophy

OmegaT is an open-source software application and project. This means that the source code of the OmegaT program is freely available, and that OmegaT's license gives its users considerable freedom in its use. Not only may it be used free of charge, users are also free to make copies of it and distribute them.

An important aspect of this freedom is that users may also modify the program's code. We think the freedom is the most important value, that users has ability to change the program to suit their own needs. This is described as "free as in speech", in contrast to "free as in beer".

The same spirit can be found within the OmegaT project and ecosystem. Users are able to download and use freely, and indeed encouraged (but not obliged in any way) to contribute back to the project. How they do so is very much up to them.

Documentation

There is nothing to stop a user writing their own user manual or a demonstration video for OmegaT, and if the project considers it remotely useful, it is likely to be made available to OmegaT's community of users.

Where routine tasks are concerned, volunteers working on the OmegaT project are generally given as much freedom as possible in determining the form of their contribution. This hands-off approach is described by the current OmegaT project coordinator as "delegated anarchy".

Localization

There is another contribution area that are actively developed, Localization of application and documentation. We have separate Localization(L10N) project that is hosted on GitHub where you can reach at https://github.com/OmegaT-L10N

Details of L10N project is described at (TBD).

Adoption of contribution

Only if these changes are considered beneficial for OmegaT's users, however, will the development team include them in OmegaT. This ensures that the users' interests are protected, and has also resulted in OmegaT being awarded the Softpedia "100% FREE" guarantee.

Communication channel for development of OmegaT

The work of programming OmegaT is done by volunteers, and in keeping with the project philosophy, the developments and improvements they make to OmegaT are ultimately at their discretion.

Users support mailing list

There is however considerable scope within the project for users to suggest improvements and influence the course of future development. The first of these is the OmegaT user group. This is the main focus of the OmegaT user community. New users of OmegaT are encouraged to make any suggestions here.

Developers mailing list

Detailed technical discussion of changes is best conducted directly with OmegaT's developers. For this purpose, a dedicated developers' mailing list exists.

Issue ticket management

Once a user has formulated a proposed change or enhancement to OmegaT in mailing list, a user will make submission to the development team "RFE" (Request for Feature Enhancement).

Literally hundreds of RFEs have already been made, and many of them already implemented. It will be realized when it is not yet implemented, and when the development team considers it beneficial to OmegaT, and one of the developers is willing to do the work of implementing it.

Plugins

OmegaT has a mechanism to add extension plugins. When you want to introduce a new feature that make OmegaT fitting your needs and believe it helps others, plugins is a first candidate to publish your feature.

There are many plugins in several categories such as

  • Theme
  • Filters
  • Dictionary access connectors
  • Machine translation engine connectors
  • others

Default drivers bundled in OmegaT are also implemented as plugin, so you can learn from it. There is also a section that describe how to write filter plugin.

Scripting

OmegaT has a mechanism to run script when event happen. You can write your scirpt in Groovy, and Javascript.