proper license for dictionary in add-on

[Fjoerfoks]

Hello all,

I was pointed by Axel Hecht to ask my question regarding licenses here.

I am in the process of obtaining a new dictionary to be used in an add-on
for Firefox and Thunderbird.

The organization is licensing the dictionary specifically to me to be used
in the products.
It is not permitted to use the dictionary in other ways then in these
products.
The license is non-exclusive and non-transferable.
Also as licensetaker I need to ensure that the file will not be used
unauthorized, abused or stolen.

Axel already pointed out that this is not the way licenses for dictionaries
work in open-source,
so I'd like to get in touch with the organization to see how we can change
all that.

What I need is some guidance in how to work on this license. What are the
minimum requirements for a dictionary
to be included in an add-on for Firefox or Thunderbird? LGPL, MGPL, or ...?
What are the consequences of including the dictionary?

As you can see, lots of questions,so any help or guidance is welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Wim

[Axel Hecht]

I think the list of licenses in
https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Dictionaries is up-to-date.

The basic gist of all these licenses is that anybody can go in, take the
dictionary, modify it in parts or in total, and redistribute it. The
licenses under which they can redistribute are limited, but not the
distribution itself, or the modifications.

about:license has more licenses, but I don't think that either
non-exclusive nor non-transferable can go in line with MPL2

Axel

[Gervase Markham]

Hi Wim,

On 16/03/15 07:27, Fjoerfoks wrote:
> What I need is some guidance in how to work on this license. What are the
> minimum requirements for a dictionary
> to be included in an add-on for Firefox or Thunderbird? LGPL, MGPL, or ...?
> What are the consequences of including the dictionary?

As Axel points out, the precise license is not so important, because all
open source licenses give anyone receiving the data the four freedoms:

* The freedom to use
* The freedom to redistribute
* The freedom to modify
* The freedom to redistribute modifications

Unless the organization you are working with is willing to give people
copies of the dictionary where they are allowed to do all those things
without restriction, then there's not much point discussing specific
licenses with them.

If they _are_ happy to do that, then I would suggest an MIT or BSD
license, so the dictionary can also be used in LibreOffice, Hunspell and
other open source projects.

Gerv