On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 18:32 +0900, Takao Fujiwara wrote:
> Beijing base team,
> 
> I have a critical question regarding to this.
> Currently the english dicts are integrated in SUNWthunderbird and 
> SUNWfirefox and I thought those legal reviews were done.

Takao,

The original English dictionaries were delivered by mozilla base team.
So Brian and Helen, could you please address this issue? I added some
comments based on my understanding below.

> 
> 1. Do you need en_US.aff?

>From enchant's code and mozilla's code at
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/myspell/
and 
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/spellcheck/myspell/src/ ,

The answer should be YES.

> 2. Do you have the proper legal review for English dictionary?

As we have an executive summary that codes downloaded from mozilla.org
and gnome.org won't need OSR, I guess we didn't do OSR for this
particular issue before.

There is no license file for en-US.aff under 
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/myspell/

and I cannot access
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries
by webcache.uk, either.  From the README file you provided below, I
guess it is released under the original BSD license which might be a
problem. If it has been changed to new BSD license, I think it should be
OK. I am not a legal person, so I think either Helen or Brian should
contact the original author Geoff Kuenning and the current author of
en-US.aff to see what the license now is. They should also decide
whether we need an OSR for it.

I don't know if you remove en-US.aff now, whether enchant and
thunderbird/firefox's spell-checking function still works. As this file
has been in S10 and Nevada for a long time, and both the Mozilla
community and the OpenOffice community are using it, maybe we can keep
it for now and find a legal solution at the same time. Maybe we should
ship the README file in the same directory, too.

Thanks,
Harry


> 
> The README shows the license below.
> 
> ---------- >8 ================
> 20040623 release.
> -- 
> This dictionary is based on a subset of the original
> English wordlist created by Kevin Atkinson for Pspell
> and  Aspell and thus is covered by his original
> LGPL license.  The affix file is a heavily modified
> version of the original english.aff file which was
> released as part of Geoff Kuenning's Ispell and as
> such is covered by his BSD license.
> 
> Thanks to both authors for their wonderful work.
> ---------- >8 ================
> 
> The README seems to describe en_US.aff is generated from english.aff
> and 
> it's under BSD license.
> It looks like a critical problem.
> 
> We cannot deliver BSD-old licensed files with GPL.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_License#UC_Berkeley_advertising_clause
> 
> I also checked english.aff with:
> http://search.cranfield.ac.uk/htdig/english.aff
> 
> It explains that this software must display the acknowledgment:
> #      This product includes software developed by Geoff Kuenning and
> #      other unpaid contributors.
> 
> 
> I'm afraid we cannot deliver en_US.aff.
> 
> Thanks,
> fujiwara
> 


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