Machine translation is the dream of every sci-fi writer and the nightmare of industry professionals. Every time the subject is raised in social and technical conversations, I am presented with an avalanche of reasons why it will never happen and how imperfect the pure concept of machine translation is.

Yet, there are countless commercial, government, and academic groups spread throughout the world putting a lot of effort and money into finding the perfect system. These groups are small and scattered and their efforts are seldom leveraged against each other, and are somewhere between two and 200 years of perfection.

Open Source development has given life to excellent systems and applications. It is time for the Language Technology Industry to join forces and establish guidelines for the development of the "Linux of Machine Translation." This presentation will lay out the minimum requirements and a vision for open source machine translation.