Announce: Hspell 1.2

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2012, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.2":
> I am, as ever, in bewildered awe of this kind of commitment to the project
> and the ability to maintain and continue to develop it in the face of
> temporary difficulties like day jobs, families, and so on.

Thanks. Indeed nine years have already passed since Hspell's first
release... As you can see from the rate of releases, and their breadth,
in recent years we've not really been able to put as much effort into
Hspell as we put into it in the first couple of years. After all, at
the same time we also made more important - and more demanding -
"releases", namely kids ;-) But we are doing our best to continue to
improve Hspell's quality - even if we can no longer find the time to
develop big new features.

> Given the (controversial, as distinguished from justifiable) GPL notion of
> "derived work" covering essentially anything that is linked to a GPLed
> piece of software, AGPL seems to gloss over the issue. What constitutes a

Like I said in my reply to Shlomi, I won't pretend that I fully
understand the AGPL. My hypothetical thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer
didn't recommend it after reading 20 different licences and finding the
AGPL the best one ;-) Far from it.

> If I host a service that has hspell.so (or whatever) as a part of it, do
> I need to offer source code - or indeed, object code - to the whole service
> to my customers, or only of hspell.so itself (modified or not)? A line
> seems to be drawn at the "system library"

I don't really know. Even if it doesn't really force (or convince) you to
open up all your software-as-a-service's code, there's still the possibility
that:

 1. You'll put a link to Hspell's code on your site, which is good
    publicity for free software and for Hspell. It also helps the users to
    know which spell-checker they are using (and where to read about its
    spelling standard, where to complain, etc.).

 2. You'll be scared enough that the AGPL might infect your proprietary code,
    that you'll decide to buy a special Hspell license, and maybe we'll
    make a few shekels :-)

In any case, if you write free software, nothing should change (please
let me know if you believe otherwise). Only the people who write non-free
software will need to think again.

> 1) IANAL. 2) I obviously do not presume to question the authors' choice of
> a license for their software. As a potential user of hosted FLOSS (though
> probably not hspell), however, I should say that at this point AGPL seems
> to me sloppy, not very well thought through, carelessly formulated, and
> therefore dangerous.

I really don't know... AGPL v3 comes from GNU, and was announced at the
same time as the regular GPL v3. I assumed the same lawers wrote it, and
they are equally sloppy or not sloppy... But I really don't know.

> It says, "stay away," even if it is not really "more
> viral than GPL" (as it seems to be, frankly). I would argue against using
> any AGPL software as a part of a hosted service

Is this a bad thing?

Basically these "hosted service" are slowly replacing yesteryear's proprietary
software. We didn't want proprietary software writers to include Hspell inside
their non-free product, so why should we want proprietary SaaS writers
to use it in theirs?

As usual, because Hspell is open-source, proprietary software writers
have the option to fully evaluate every aspect of Hspell, and its
suitability for their product, before they decide to use it. But if they
do use it, they should indeed not use the AGPL but rather negotiate a special
license from us.

>, while continuing to
> support GPL under similar circumstances. I wonder, therefore, if using AGPL
> helps or hurts promoting the licensed software in SaaS deployments.

What do I, Hspell, or the world, have to gain from promoting Hspell's
use in proprietary SaaS deployments?

Thanks,
Nadav.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                   Saturday, Mar 3 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Hospital: Where they wake you up to give
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |you a sleeping pill.