Announce: Hspell 1.2

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.2":
> OK, so you have made Hspell under the Affero General Public Licence version 3.
> Will it help in promoting the open-source nature (or "freedom") of
> web-services? Let's see.

Let me start by admitting that I don't know. We didn't switch to the
AGPL because some highly paid lawyer recommended that we do. We are
*hoping* that it will make a small difference. And we're pretty sure it
won't cause any harm.

> 4. Set up such a web service on my servers, while publishing its source code,
> and the source code to the (unmodified or possibly lightly patched) Hspell.

If that means that these software-as-a-service sites that use Hspell
will need to admit that they do, and provide a link to its source code,
that would already be a large improvement over the situation today.

It would be a nice bonus if the AGPL causes more of such server's
software to be freed, but even if that doesn't happen (and you explain
why it won't), users would still be better off: They will know where the
service got its Hebrew wordlist from, and have a way to report bugs in
it, and perhaps even use this wordlist for different things.

Anyway, you can think of this as an experiment. In a few years, we can
tell if the AGPL made any difference in the way that companies use
Hspell, for the better or the worse. I believe that nothing will change
for the worse - but if it does, and we see that the AGPL only made
things worse for the intended free-software users, we can easily re-release
Hspell with a different license. If we discover that the AGPL isn't the
solution to this (growing) problem, but some XGPL is, we can also switch
to that. Since the job of improving the spell-checker's vocabulary never
ends, we'll always have new releases we can re-license ;-)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                 Wednesday, Feb 29 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"Outlook not so good." Wow! That magic 8-
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |ball knows everything! So, what about IE?