Announce: Hspell 1.2

[Nadav Har'El]

Dan Kenigsberg and I are proud to present version 1.2 of Hspell, the free
Hebrew spell-checker and morphological analyzer.

You can find the new release in the project's homepage:

        http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/

Over two years have passed since our previous release. In that time, we
continued to improve Hspell's accuracy and further enlarged its vocabulary,
reaching over 24,000 base words. We continued to document Hspell's spelling
standard, which strictly follows the decisions of the Academy of the Hebrew
Language; The document, http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/niqqudless.pdf, now spans
over 80 pages.

We also fixed a number of bugs. The most serious bugs were discovered in the
hunspell-format dictionary (which is used by OpenOffice, Firefox, and other
projects), so upgrading to Hspell 1.2 is strongly recommended for users and
distributors of the hunspell-format dictionary. For more details about the
improvements in this release, see http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/WHATSNEW.

In this release we've also made an important, perhaps even dramatic, change
to Hspell's license. Until now, Hspell was licensed under the terms of the
GNU GPL version 2. From now on, it is licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3.

This license change probably means very little to most users; The AGPL is
still an Open Source license (of course, we wouldn't have it any other way),
and it is compatible with the GPL (version 3). But nevertheless we consider
this an important change, so I'd like to further explain its rationale.

The GPL was designed to promote free software, and protect its ecology.
The GPL allows users to freely share and improve the software, while ensuring
that the improved versions remain free forever, for all of society's benefit.
Nobody is allowed to market their improved version as a proprietary,
closed-source, product.

However, in recent years the proprietary software industry started undergoing
a transformation: Whereas most software used to be distributed as a product,
software is now often distributed as a service. Users do not install the
software on their machine, but rather use it through the service provider's
Web site. Such service providers discovered that they were exempt from the
GPL's terms: As they were not distributing binaries of the software, they
also did not have to distribute source code. Nowadays users frequently find
themselves using software through a Web site which is based on free software -
but the user cannot install this software on a different server, or modify it.
Very often, the user cannot even know which free software is providing the
service he or she is using.

We've unfortunately seen this happening with Hspell too. E.g., traditional
word games had to be free software if they were to be based on Hspell,
but now online games, non-free and closed source, are appearing based on
Hspell. Whereas a closed-source word processor could not include Hspell,
an equally closed-source online word processor did. Even worse, most
software-as-a-service containing Hspell did not even acknowledge this fact.
This not only denies us this simple courtesy, but also denies the users
the knowledge of which spell-checker they are using, what is its spelling
standard, and where they can report problems they discover with the spell-
checker.

The AGPLv3 (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html), which Hspell will now
be using, attempts to close this loophole. Online software-as-a-service
providers which derive their service from AGPL software (like Hspell), now
need to make the source code of their service (or parts of it) available to
their users. This will allow users that wish to do so to install the service
on a different server, to better understand the service they are using,
and even to modify it.

Anway, I'll get off my soapbox now, and return to Hspell 1.2.

Not only people who download Hspell from our site will benefit from this
release. For several years now, only a minority of Hspell's users downloaded
it from our site. Hspell has become the de-facto standard Hebrew spell-checker
in the free software world and beyond; It is available in Linux distributions,
in Aspell's and Hunspell's dictionary collections, as OpenOffice and Firefox
plugins, and more. We expect that the new Hspell release will soon propagate
to all these distributions and applications, so that their users will also be
able to enjoy the improvements in Hspell 1.2.

We hope that you enjoy Hspell 1.2.

Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg.
February 28, 2012.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                   Tuesday, Feb 28 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I want to be a human being, not a human
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |doing -- Scatman John