Announce: Hspell 1.2

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.2":
> 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.

Hi,

I'm curious why you think the end-result (and I'm not talking about the
situation seven years ago) isn't better than we could have had with an LGPL
Hspell.

If Hspell were LGPL, it would have been tightly integrated inside OpenOffice,
and commercial products from IBM, Sun and perhaps others that build on it
would have had Hebrew spell-checking out of the box. But its users might not
know where this Hebrew spell-checking came from, what its spelling standard
is. And they would likely get old versions of the spell-checker.

Instead, what is happening now, is that Hebrew spell-checking is a
plug-in (or in Linux, a separate package, e.g., hunspell-he in Fedora).
Any user can get it, easily and freely, and while doing this he or she will
always have the latest version, and be aware of exactly which spell-checker
they are using, its spelling standard, and who to complain to in case of
problems.

Frankly, I never understood why OpenOffice not just GPL. Why the
insistance to allow Sun and IBM to create proprietary versions of it?

Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                   Saturday, Mar 3 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |a fine for doing well.