Announce: Hspell 1.2
Jonathan Ben Avraham
yba at tkos.co.il
Sat Mar 3 22:04:49 IST 2012
Hi Orna, Nadav,
Google wont stay with any outdated version and Nadav wont succeed in suing
Google for anything. AGPL is an own-goal in the truest sense. Google will
simply reverse engineer Nadav's code in a clean room envrionment, if they
think that they need it. And if they don't, as you hint, we all lose. The
result of using the AGPL will simply be to limit the adoption of the code
by smaller players, for which everyone stands to lose. At best, they
will modify the code for their needs and let the download button provide
the original, unmodifed code, which is Ok if they are not distributing
code only a web service. It would have been better for humanity and
possibly for Nadav's pocket to have released under dual license,
proprietary and a less restrictive Open Source license. It's not too late,
please reconsider. Consider the small number of improvements, if any, that
have been contributed to Hspell over the years by anyone other that Nadav
and Dan under the GPL license. If the licence had been at least LGPL the
code would have found its way into OpenOffice, which would have given
OpenOffice an advantage in the Hebrew market and might have resulted in
more user-contributed code.
- yba
On Sat, 3 Mar 2012, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2012 06:56:39 +0200
> From: Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda <ladypine at gmail.com>
> To: Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>
> Cc: linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> Subject: Re: Announce: Hspell 1.2
>
> 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 using the outdated version 1.1 rather than do this.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
>
>
--
EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5 83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA ~. .~ Tk Open Systems
=}------------------------------------------------ooO--U--Ooo------------{=
- yba at tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
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