Subject: Re: Copyright of Modified Ispell Code
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Fri Jul 06 2001 - 03:26:59 CDT
On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 11:20:32PM -0400, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> > Thanks to work from the OpenOffice team, Pspell is on the verge of being
> > able to work correctly on Win32. For this reason I would like to take
> > your Ispell code and make a Pspell module out of it. This will allow
> > Projects such as yourself and OpenOffice to only use Pspell, which is how
> > it was truly intended to be used, as a Portable wrapper to multiple spell
> > checkers.
>
> > Unfortunately it is not clear what the copyright of the modified
> > Ispell code is.
>
> It seems pretty clear to me. The files in src/other/spell/xp/ have the
> "original Ispell license".
>
> > If it is under the GPL this will probably mean that programs like
> > OpenOffice or Mozilla will *not* be able to use it.
>
> Understood WRT Mozilla, but isn't OpenOffice under the GPL? And last I
OpenOffice is dual licensed under LGPL and SSCL (that allows to hide the
modified source if openoffice API is still supported).
> heard, Mozilla was transitioning to the GPL too. (And why does Mozilla
> need a spellchecker anyway, it's a web browser for !@#$'s sake.)
Mozilla includes Mail agent, so spellchecking seems to be useful thing in it.
It's also nice to have content of the forms user fills in to be spellchecked
too. In fact, Netscape 6PR1 supports spellchecking (US english only, via
sublicensed commercial spellchecking module).
>
> > Therefore, the best thing, in my view, would be to release under the same
> > copyright of the original Ispell code which is BSD.
>
> The problem with this that the original Ispell license (classic BSD)
> is *NOT* compatible with the GPL. It has an advertising clause, even
> in the version included with AbiWord:
>
> * 4. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this * software
> * must display the following acknowledgment:
> * This product includes software developed by Geoff Kuenning and
> * other unpaid contributors.
>
> Since you included URL's to gnu.org, I'm sure you're familiar with
> this problem, which is detailed well at
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. Richard seems (for once) too
> modest to point out that the advertising clause is incompatible with
> the GPL (which prohibutes additional restrictions), but it is.
Wow! That's very interesting! I wonder why nobody publically pointed this
out.
> > However if you are not willing to do that LGPL will also work.
> >
> > Or, if that will not work than perhaps you can release it under the GPL
> > but with the exception that other non-GPL compatible programs may use it.
> > This can either mean any programs (included non-free ones) or only
> > programs which are considered "free software" by the FSF (see
> > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html) or are Open Source by OSI
> > definition (see http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html).
> >
> > So what will it be. I really hope that you are willing to release it
> > under a license which will allow other programs such as OpenOffice and
> > Mozilla to use it.
>
> It isn't our choice. It's actually illegal to distribute a build of
> AbiWord that contains ispell since the licenses are not compatible.
> And needless to say, we can't just change the license of ispell unless
> we include the same GPL-incompatible advertising clause in the new
> license!
>
> As for pspell, if it dlopen()'s the ispell module, the legality is
> questionable but quite possibly okay.
It seems we also can make our ispell code a dinamically loadable module and
dlopen() it. Of course, the usefullness of this is questionable, and using
pspell as an interface is much preferred.
Best regards,
-Vlad
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