Re: [aspell-devel] Problems with aspell-en license

[Glenn Maynard]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 12:55:26AM -0400, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> I will remove the DEC word list from my source only if Debian will refuse 
> to include the English word list due to questionable copyright on some of 
> the sources that DEC uses.  But If I do I will make a note on the reason 
> why it is removed which will include a statement by me which more or less 
> states that I think debian-legal is being completely anneal about the 
> matter.

Relax.  I'm only suggesting that, since the wenglish upstream claims to
have gone to lengths to keep the worldlist "free of copyright", and he's
used this wordlist, he might be a good person to ask about this.  (Maybe
he has a solid explanation of why it's OK; maybe he has an explicit
statement from the source of the wordlist.)

My experience with debian-legal is that, while they're picky about
licenses (for very good reason), they tend to respond to questioned
licenses with "let's fix it", not "let's rip it out", whenever possible.

The question of whether wordlists are copyrightable came up before:

   http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200208/msg00288.html

There doesn't appear to have been any resolution, though, since it
wasn't required at the time.  (It may not be now, either.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard