On Sat, Mar 03, 2012, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell
1.2":
> 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 using the outdated version 1.1 rather than do this.
I believe that Google is actually still using Hspell 0.9, not even
1.1...
If you look very carefully in Google Docs (I can't even recall how I
found it), you may find a link to this page:
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/legal.html
Would it have killed them to also mention Hspell - and not just free
software whose license demanded attribution?
(if you're wondering whether Google *really* uses Hspell, they do admit
it in one place: http://code.google.com/opensource/patches.html).
Moreover, I definitely don't expect a "powered by Hspell" button on the
Google home page ;-) But what is so strange in expecting a link to
Hspell while the Hebrew spellchecker is running, or in the spellchecking
help page in Hebrew? It's not just (or even mainly) an issue of ego, or
of making it easier to find the Hspell source code. It's also an issue that
users of the Hebrew spell-checker in Gmail and Google Docs don't even
know what spell-checker they are using, and which spelling standard it
enforces and why. You didn't even know they were using an outdated
version (Hspell 0.9) because they didn't say this anywhere that you
could find. Basically Google took away the users' freedom to know what
they are using, which is one of the most basic freedoms of free
software.
Nadav.
--
Nadav Har'El | Saturday, Mar 3 2012,
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if
http://nadav.harel.org.il |a woodchuck would chuck wood?
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