[tarancato]

So much money they are making and they can't hire anybody who can write English properly or write a PDF that is not composed of a handful of font faces and sizes.

I also find it funny they have fired the CEO (the PDF does not say he stepped down voluntarily) but he's the one sending that link to the mailing list. I call bs.

[hannob]

There are a lot of reasons to criticize Wosign. Lack of English skills isn't one of them.

I didn't realize this until I first visited China, but there are parts of the world where it's really hard to find people fluent in English. If you require people to be fluent in English in order to participate in running the Internet you're locking a large number of world regions out.

[AdmiralAsshat]

I wouldn't hold it against a Chinese company for not having a native English speaker. But I would hold it against them for not at least having a native speaker on retainer to proofread a document that they're about to send out to an international community. It just looks unprofessional.

And that's all it is, really. Stuff that just screams, "Did no one proofread this thing before sending it out?" Probably not. Because whoever wrote it was probably the most fluent person at the company.

---

FWIW, I have native-English speaking programmer friends who ask me to proofread their stuff. I don't mind. One is an amazing programmer, but his writing ability is somewhere around 9th-grade proficiency. The fact remains that being able to write correctly is considered a "bare minimum" quality in the professional world, and it doesn't matter if you wrote your own virtual machine in Assembly in your spare time--if you sound like a college dropout in your resume, they'll skip over you.

It is similarly difficult to inspire confidence in a CA when their "transparency report" sounds unprofessionally cobbled together.

[wbl]

Learn. You only need a handful of people to read the language in which 99% of all scientific publications are written in.

Reading knowledge of a language can be gotten fairly quickly.

[hannob]

This wasn't about reading knowledge, it was about writing knowledge. The original poster was complaining about grammar errors in their own publications. And even learning reading knowledge of a language that is totally different from your own isn't so easy. I spent quite some time trying to learn Mandarin.

Also out of curiosity: How many languages that are not related to your native language can you fluently read?

[aianus]

There are millions and millions of people in Canada and the US that are fluent in both English and Mandarin. Hire one of them.

[johnnyfaehell]

> So much money they are making and they can't hire anybody who can write English properly

If you're going to make fun of someone's English then you should probably write better English yourself. At the end of the day English isn't their first language and they'll probably very rarely have to use English. I think some slack should be given on this front.

[geofft]

> and they'll probably very rarely have to use English.

The CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements and the mailing list discussions all happen in English. The major root programs all use English as their language of communication, to the best of my knowledge. The SSL/TLS and X.509 specifications are in English. The major browsers and TLS stacks have technical documentation, code comments, and code review in English. mozilla.dev.security.policy is in English. The international language of scientific research (including cryptographic research) is in English. The CVE program is in English. All of these are reasons not only to have people who are fluent in technical English, but to make hiring such people a priority.

In particular, the inability to communicate precise, subtle technical concepts was very relevant to some of the problems here, like "You may not issue SHA-1 certs after this date" meaning the actual, calendar date of issuance and not the recorded validity period in the certificate. (There was also an element of malice, but it could have gotten sorted faster if communication were easier.) Even if all the others were in some other language, the CA/Browser Forum alone would be enough to make anyone who wants to be a CA (or an HTTPS client implementor) must make fluency in technical English a priority.

It is, of course, highly unfortunate that people from non-Anglophone countries are at a disadvantage here. In an ideal world we wouldn't have that disadvantage. But there doesn't seem to be a way around picking a language to be the scientific lingua franca.

[Normal_gaussian]

tarancato isn't making any money from these comments, so it seems reasonable that they are not using some form of proofreader.

[johnnyfaehell]

I am not bothered by their English or using a proof reader. I just think it's hypocritical to throw stones at people for not having good English when they don't operate in an English speaking market when yours isn't perfect either.

Also do you honestly think that was written by the business team, do you think the business team would have been able to properly edit a technical document in another language?

[cshimmin]

He's not throwing stones at people, he's throwing them at the company, WoSign. FWIW, I agree. They should have gotten (i.e. paid) someone to write a coherent document for this important communication.

[johnnyfaehell]

> FWIW, I agree. They should have gotten (i.e. paid) someone to write a coherent document for this important communication.

Seriously you'll be hard press to find a paid translator that can translate technical documents.

Also the document is actually reasonable coherent. Picking on the language level of the document over the technical content of the document seems kind petty.

[michaelt]

The CA Browser Forum puts out a lot of documents in english - often full of both technical terms and complex multi-layered clauses and subclauses.

You'd hope they'd have a good technical translator already on their payroll.

[JohnTHaller]

WoSign owns Israel-based CA StartCom (from the shady event where WoSign bought Startcom, didn't disclose it, and started issuing invalid certificates through StartCom). Both operate in multiple English language markets.

[tarancato]

I don't speak English natively, and any corrections are welcome. On the other hand I don't run a multi-million business based on writing comments on Hacker News so currently hiring a PR person to proofread these comments is not within the boundaries of my budget.

WoSign runs a business that is basically based on trust, and Nigerian scammers have sent me PDFs that looked far more convincing and trustable than that one WoSign posted.