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.
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.
Reading knowledge of a language can be gotten fairly quickly.
Also out of curiosity: How many languages that are not related to your native language can you fluently read?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You'd hope they'd have a good technical translator already on their payroll.
Japanese is one. I've many times read comments written in Japanese in the Ruby language source code and understood their meaning, but there is absolutely zero ability for me to visit that country and be able to interact with anyone.
The author of this incident report is leagues more capable than I am in writing a report in a foreign language. They didn't insult my mother, or my dog, or call me names by accident. I don't see the justification in insulting their 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.