Nadav, Dan, First - thank you! I have no idea how you find the time to work on Hspell along with raising families. I think the notable date and hour of this email give a hint :)
Regarding the license - AGPL sounds like a great idea, but It is hard for me to imagine gmail, for example, with a "powered by Hspell" button. I am afraid they will prefer to keep using the outdated version 1.1 rather than do this. Orna On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Nadav Har'El <n...@math.technion.ac.il>wrote: > Dan Kenigsberg and I are proud to present version 1.2 of Hspell, the free > Hebrew spell-checker and morphological analyzer. > > You can find the new release in the project's homepage: > > http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/ > > Over two years have passed since our previous release. In that time, we > continued to improve Hspell's accuracy and further enlarged its vocabulary, > reaching over 24,000 base words. We continued to document Hspell's spelling > standard, which strictly follows the decisions of the Academy of the Hebrew > Language; The document, http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/niqqudless.pdf, now > spans > over 80 pages. > > We also fixed a number of bugs. The most serious bugs were discovered in > the > hunspell-format dictionary (which is used by OpenOffice, Firefox, and other > projects), so upgrading to Hspell 1.2 is strongly recommended for users and > distributors of the hunspell-format dictionary. For more details about the > improvements in this release, see http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/WHATSNEW. > > In this release we've also made an important, perhaps even dramatic, change > to Hspell's license. Until now, Hspell was licensed under the terms of the > GNU GPL version 2. From now on, it is licensed under the GNU AGPL version > 3. > > This license change probably means very little to most users; The AGPL is > still an Open Source license (of course, we wouldn't have it any other > way), > and it is compatible with the GPL (version 3). But nevertheless we consider > this an important change, so I'd like to further explain its rationale. > > The GPL was designed to promote free software, and protect its ecology. > The GPL allows users to freely share and improve the software, while > ensuring > that the improved versions remain free forever, for all of society's > benefit. > Nobody is allowed to market their improved version as a proprietary, > closed-source, product. > > However, in recent years the proprietary software industry started > undergoing > a transformation: Whereas most software used to be distributed as a > product, > software is now often distributed as a service. Users do not install the > software on their machine, but rather use it through the service provider's > Web site. Such service providers discovered that they were exempt from the > GPL's terms: As they were not distributing binaries of the software, they > also did not have to distribute source code. Nowadays users frequently find > themselves using software through a Web site which is based on free > software - > but the user cannot install this software on a different server, or modify > it. > Very often, the user cannot even know which free software is providing the > service he or she is using. > > We've unfortunately seen this happening with Hspell too. E.g., traditional > word games had to be free software if they were to be based on Hspell, > but now online games, non-free and closed source, are appearing based on > Hspell. Whereas a closed-source word processor could not include Hspell, > an equally closed-source online word processor did. Even worse, most > software-as-a-service containing Hspell did not even acknowledge this fact. > This not only denies us this simple courtesy, but also denies the users > the knowledge of which spell-checker they are using, what is its spelling > standard, and where they can report problems they discover with the spell- > checker. > > The AGPLv3 (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html), which Hspell will > now > be using, attempts to close this loophole. Online software-as-a-service > providers which derive their service from AGPL software (like Hspell), now > need to make the source code of their service (or parts of it) available to > their users. This will allow users that wish to do so to install the > service > on a different server, to better understand the service they are using, > and even to modify it. > > Anway, I'll get off my soapbox now, and return to Hspell 1.2. > > Not only people who download Hspell from our site will benefit from this > release. For several years now, only a minority of Hspell's users > downloaded > it from our site. Hspell has become the de-facto standard Hebrew > spell-checker > in the free software world and beyond; It is available in Linux > distributions, > in Aspell's and Hunspell's dictionary collections, as OpenOffice and > Firefox > plugins, and more. We expect that the new Hspell release will soon > propagate > to all these distributions and applications, so that their users will also > be > able to enjoy the improvements in Hspell 1.2. > > We hope that you enjoy Hspell 1.2. > > Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg. > February 28, 2012. > > -- > Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Feb 28 > 2012, > n...@math.technion.ac.il > |----------------------------------------- > Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I want to be a human being, not a > human > http://nadav.harel.org.il |doing -- Scatman John > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > -- Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda. http://ladypine.org
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