One of the most flattering thing (even if not very rewarding in the financial sense) that can happen to a free software author is that his free software gets used in some product with a high penetration in the general population. One good example from the past was Omer Zak's port of Fribidi (by Dov Grobgeld and others) which was used in actual Nokia phones.
Today I realized that Google's GMail service, which until recently had no spell-checking support for Hebrew messages, finally does have Hebrew spell- checking, and it uses none other than Hspell (version 0.9) to do so! In this way, thousands of Israeli users who never heard of Free Software or Linux or anything like that, are now using the Free software Hspell. Of course, this also raises a bunch of moral and philosophical issues: whether Google should have acknowledged their use of Hspell on their site (I can't find any such thing), or whether they should have at least acknowledged it to me (they didn't... I only know that they use Hspell because of certain "decoy" words that Hspell contains). It also raises again the interesting question of how should the GPL be changed in (if at all) in a world where proprietary Internet services like GMail replace proprietary software as "the enemy" that the GPL was trying to "battle". Many people still don't understand enough, or don't appreciate, the significance of this question, which the GPL 3 is starting to address (in a certain way, which I still don't know if is the correct way). Anyway, enjoy Hspell (now in GMail too!), and I hope that some time soon we'll release a new version (1.0, finally) with over 1,000 new words and other improvements. Nadav. -- Nadav Har'El | Saturday, Mar 11 2006, 12 Adar 5766 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Tea or coffee? Coffee, without cream. It http://nadav.harel.org.il |will be without milk, we have no cream. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
