1.6 Using gettext in new packages

If you are writing a freely available program and want to internationalize it you are welcome to use GNU ‘gettext’ in your package. Of course you have to respect the GNU Library General Public License which covers the use of the GNU ‘gettext’ library. This means in particular that even non-free programs can use libintl as a shared library, whereas only free software can use libintl as a static library or use modified versions of libintl.

Once the sources are changed appropriately and the setup can handle the use of gettext the only thing missing are the translations. The Free Translation Project is also available for packages which are not developed inside the GNU project. Therefore the information given above applies also for every other Free Software Project. Contact ‘coordinator@translationproject.org’ to make the ‘.pot’ files available to the translation teams.