"Sean E. Russell" wrote: > > I'm writing to request a formal "ruling" on a specific case of mixing the GPL > with a non-GPL program. > > The program in question is XXE. XXE is a document-oriented XML editor. The > application is not distributed under the GPL. The "basic" version is free, > the "professional" version is not, and I believe that the source code is > available.
<snip/> > When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is yes. The > interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; the GPL doesn't > restrict what tools you process the program with." > > To me, this is applicable to the situation with XXE. The dictionaries aren't > programs, or source code. They are entirely data. The XXE spell checker, > which is also not GPL code, merely interprets the data files. Last year we also found the question debatable. But faced to legal troubles, we simply (well, it was hard work) created our own 4 dictionaries which owe nothing to ispell or any other GPL-ed software or data. A technical precision though: XXE spell checker never was able to directly interpret ispell dictionaries. XXE M1.x dictionaries were built using word lists extracted from ispell dictionaries. Once again, currently, this is no longer the case: our 4 dictionaries owe nothing to ispell or any other GPL-ed software or data.
