Hi Nadav,
On Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:01:50 +0200
Nadav Har'El <n...@math.technion.ac.il> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 29, 2012, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.2":
> > OK, so you have made Hspell under the Affero General Public Licence version
> > 3.
> > Will it help in promoting the open-source nature (or "freedom") of
> > web-services? Let's see.
>
> Let me start by admitting that I don't know. We didn't switch to the
> AGPL because some highly paid lawyer recommended that we do. We are
> *hoping* that it will make a small difference. And we're pretty sure it
> won't cause any harm.
OK.
>
> > 4. Set up such a web service on my servers, while publishing its source
> > code,
> > and the source code to the (unmodified or possibly lightly patched) Hspell.
>
> If that means that these software-as-a-service sites that use Hspell
> will need to admit that they do, and provide a link to its source code,
> that would already be a large improvement over the situation today.
>
> It would be a nice bonus if the AGPL causes more of such server's
> software to be freed, but even if that doesn't happen (and you explain
> why it won't), users would still be better off: They will know where the
> service got its Hebrew wordlist from, and have a way to report bugs in
> it, and perhaps even use this wordlist for different things.
>
> Anyway, you can think of this as an experiment. In a few years, we can
> tell if the AGPL made any difference in the way that companies use
> Hspell, for the better or the worse. I believe that nothing will change
> for the worse - but if it does, and we see that the AGPL only made
> things worse for the intended free-software users, we can easily re-release
> Hspell with a different license. If we discover that the AGPL isn't the
> solution to this (growing) problem, but some XGPL is, we can also switch
> to that. Since the job of improving the spell-checker's vocabulary never
> ends, we'll always have new releases we can re-license ;-)
>
OK, sounds fair. Good luck.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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