On Sat, 11 Mar 2006, Nadav Har'El wrote: > 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.
We also notice a couple messages to the PersianComputing list from people at Google asking about how to get Persian spell-checking work with aspell. > 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). Well, as far as the license is concerned, they don't have to acknowlege. Original BSD license had such terms, but GPL doesn't. So it's just moral as you said, but you cannot expect a big company like Google to acknowledge every single piece of Free Software they use. Now their developers sometimes do, but the company as a whole, I don't think it's sensible to expect they do. > 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). I remember there was a certain GPL derivative license that exactly did that, but cannot find what it was named right now. > 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. Yeah, and congrats to you. Any plans to add Hebrew support to Aspell? I should take a look at the Persian Aspell too I guess. > Nadav. --behdad http://behdad.org/ "Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill" -- Dan Bern, "New American Language" --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
