Announce: Hspell 1.2

Sat Mar 3 06:56:39 IST 2012

Nadav, Dan,

First - thank you! I have no idea how you find the time to work on Hspell
along with
raising families. I think the notable date and hour of this email give a
hint :)

Regarding the license - AGPL sounds like a great idea, but It is hard for
me to imagine
gmail, for example, with a "powered by Hspell" button. I am afraid they
will prefer to keep
using the outdated version 1.1 rather than do this.

Orna

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>wrote:

> 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
>
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>

-- 
Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda.
http://ladypine.org
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