[aspell-devel] New Bengali Dictionary Ready But Author Does Not Want to Release ...

[Kevin Atkinson]

A new Aspell Bengali (bn) dictionary is ready, however the author (who
will remain anonymous since he did not post publicly) does not wish to
release it for fear that other companies would simply steal the word list
and incorporated it into their own (non-free I assume)  spell-checkers
without giving him acknowledgment:

  If I gave everybody free access to the word lists then there
  are at least two companies I know of that would simply steal them and
  incorporate them into their spell-checkers without even so much as an
  acknowledgment. I wouldn't like that to happen. Recently I tested a
  spell-checker from one of them at their request, and it couldn't 
  recognize loads of words even from a list of the 1000 most frequent 
  words in Hindi! When I passed on my findings to the company they claimed 
  that it was due a small bug in their program! Well that bug has yet to 
  be fixed. So you can well imagine what would happen if these guys had 
  access to my word lists. I have spent hundreds of hours on processing 
  various corpora to put the lists together and I wouldn't like to see 
  them being misappropriated.

The author is also planning on working on a Hindi (hi) dictionary.

Of course I want him to release the list, but I do not know what to tell 
him to get him to do so.  I told him that he can release he dictionary 
under a GPL license.  However, it would still be easy for others to 
incorporated the word list in there spell-checker.  And if they did it 
would be difficult to proved that they did.  Thus I can not really address 
his concern.

If anyone has anything to say to him that might convince him to release 
the Dictionary please let me know.  I will forward it to him.

Thanks in advance.
-- 
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org