[Please distribute this document as widely as possible.] In the past couple of months I have put a lot of time in developing Aspell. This comes after over a year of non-development. Without some serious financial support there is a very good chance that Aspell will slip back into non-development mode as was the case for most of 2003.
I have had a lot of free time to put into Aspell since the only other responsibility I've had was to finish up my masters thesis. I was hoping to go on to a PhD program. However, my luck has not been so good as I have yet to be accepted into a program with financial support. This means that, unless I can get some money to continue to develop Aspell, I will likely need to get a job over the summer in order to support my self. If this happens I will likely have very little time to spend on Aspell. It is very likely I will wind up losing interest in Aspell, yet again, and thus Aspell 0.60 may never officially be released as there are a number of things to do (see the end of this email). I would *really* like to be able to continue to work on Aspell over the summer so that I can get Aspell 0.60 out the door and perhaps make significant progress on the following version. However, In order to do this I need some serious financial support. Considering the GNU Aspell is the *only* actively maintained general purpose free (as in freedom) spell checker I think contributing a few thousand dollars to the development of Aspell would be a wise investment for an Open Source company. If you wish to contribute a modest amount of money you can do so now by using the SourceForge donation system: http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=245 If you wish to talk to me (as in over the phone) before contributing money, or wish to only contribute money towards development of a certain area of Aspell, this can be arranged. Thanks in advance. APPENDIX: Some of the many things that need to be done before I consider Aspell 0.60 ready for release: * The Aspell language toolkit needs enhancing to be able to create Aspell 0.50 dictionaries and to allow multiple dictionary packages for the same language. * The suggestion code needs some work now that Aspell supports affix compression. In particular I want to be able to support a very simple soundslike algorithm which can be used with affix compression. I also what to support using MySpell N-Gram method. * Testing and bug fixes. I would also really like to: * Clean up copyright notices and bring the Aspell package up to GNU Standards. * Come up with a nroff mode for spell checking. * Develop an enhanced C API to support the advanced features of Aspell. This API should supporting doing anything that can be done with the Aspell utility. -- http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org _______________________________________________ Aspell-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-devel
