Announce: Hspell 1.2

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.2":
> Hi Nadav,
> It's a question of how you look at the world - the way it should be
> or the way it is. The way it is (or was), there was no way either
> LibreOffice or OpenOffice would ever be GPL and so Hspell did not
> get in. You can claim a moral victory but the user community is
> poorer as a result.

Hi, yes, this is a long argument, and I don't want to claim any
"victory", but I do want to defend our decision to use GPL and that the
community is not "poorer" as a result. I'm not sure how "richer" it is,
but I don't think it is "poorer".

Sticking Hspell into OpenOffice, and then into a dozen other spell-
checker-using projects, could have given the community some temporary
benefit - e.g.,, Hebrew spell-chekcing in OpenOffice would have been
available a year earlier. But in the long run, I sincerely believe that
the community is better off with the move to muli-lingual spell-checkers
(namely, hunspell) where the user is responsible to separately install
spell-checker data for his favorite languages - and the spell-checker
itself isn't included with the individual applications.

I believe that this makes it easier for the developers (they don't need
to know anything special about Hebrew, they just use the hunspell API),
and easier for the user (who can install spell-checkers once and have
them be used by all their software).

It also eliminates any unfair advantage that proprietary software might
gain from having an improved version of Hspell or having a better-integrated 
Hspell. Proprietary software may only use a user-installed version of
Hspell, but any other software on the system may use it too, so the
proprietary software can't gain any advantage by its use of Hspell.

But, as often happens, my random signature below, or any permutations of it,
may be relevant ;-)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                     Sunday, Mar 4 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The road to good intentions is paved with
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |hell.