[Announcement] Unicode Dictionary 0.9.5 beta
Dario de Judicibus
+----------------------------------------------------+
| Thank you to all wxWindows people who supported my |
| development effort in the last few months. This is |
| really a great community. |
+----------------------------------------------------+
PROGRAM
Unicode Dictionary
VERSION
0.9.5 beta
CATEGORY
References->Dictionaries->Freeware
URL
http://www.dejudicibus/dizionario/
CONTACT
dizio...@dejudicibus.it
WEBMASTER
Dario de Judicibus
SITE LANGUAGE
Italian (a quick reference page is provided in English too)
DESCRIPTION
The Unicode Dictionary is the follow-on of Dictionary Program. Differently
from its anchestor, this program has no more limitations on record length
and database size. Furthermore, it allows to display any Unicode 4.0 Basic
Multilingual Plane glyph, supports bi-directional scripts, and glyph
modifiers. It is available on Microsoft Windows NT/2K/XP. It can run also on
Windows 9.x assuming you installed the Microsoft Unicode Layer (MSUL). It is
also enabled to be portable on Linux and Mac platforms, but port is not yet
available. We are looking for expert developers who wish to volunteer for
porting.
INTERFACE LANGUAGES
English: interface, messages, about, license, help
Italian: interface, messages, about, license
Others : none
Planned: French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese
NOTE
This is a BETA version, so we are still testing before releasing final
version.
AVAILABLE DICTIONARIES
Currently only two dictionaries are vailable out of the 87 available for the
Dictionary Program: the Inglese-Italiano and the Polacco-Italiano. We will
release soon Cherokee-Italiano and other few dictionaries. We planned to
port all 87 dictionaries to the new format (WBX) by June 2004.
Dario de Judicibus
"Jorg B" <soli...@xs4all.nl> wrote in message
news:4035F020...@xs4all.nl...
> I can't access it :-(
http://www.dejudicibus.it/dizionario/
I forgot the .it ;-)
David Elliott
>
> "Helix" <helix-...@despammed.com> wrote in message
> news:c1aean$e55$1...@newsread.albacom.net...
>
>> IMHO
>> The best protection you can have is a GPL licensing model.
>> However I never contribute to proprietary software.
>> Good luck.
>
> I would like to better understand this point. Why a GPL licensing model
> might prevent people from steeling dictionaries? My application is
> made of a
> viewer and a series of linguistic modules. You install the viewer and
> as
> many linguistic modules as you like. Each module may contain one or
> more
> dictionaries. The real value is not the program, even if it was a huge
> work
> ;-), but the dictionaries. If someone steels a dictionary and convert
> it to
> text, there is no way to demonstrate it was that dictionary. No way
> GPL l.m.
> can be applied.
>
I suppose if it contained exactly the same words that would be a pretty
clear indication. The GPL is applicable because it will ensure that
the dictionaries are distributed in source form, not converted to some
other format. If they are and the source is not distributed then
they'd be in violation of the GPL.
People and companies would be able to use the dictionaries, but they'd
have to distribute them in the machine readable format so that they can
be modified.
-Dave
Dario de Judicibus
"David Elliott" <ell...@stcnet.com> wrote in message
news:01C83378-66D0-11D8...@stcnet.com...
> People and companies would be able to use the dictionaries, but they'd
> have to distribute them in the machine readable format so that they can
> be modified.
I understand, but I do not make money by selling dictionaries. They are
free. Let's be practical. If somebody just extract terms and translations
from my dictionaries and use them in their own commercial program:
1. how can I be aware of that?
2. if I am aware, how can I demonstrate that?
3. if I can demonstrate it, what can I do?
About 3, let us suppose that a guy in USA or Australia steel my word lists.
Should I pay an Italian legal to go to some Italian tribunal (European law
states that crime was performed in Italy since dictionaries are on an
Italian server) to accuse someone in USA? I have no money for that, and I
suppose I have no chance to win. The only way to protect dictionaries is to
avoid that they are stolen. Our dictionaries ARE free and MUST continue to
be free. We trust the importance of freeware and free resources in Internet,
but it is very hard to defend freedom.
DdJ
Dario de Judicibus
> It's impossible to create any effective technical measure which
> prevents them from being used outside your program. If your program
> can read them then so can any other program.
I know. Even if I will cypher them in future, any good hacker will be able
to decypher them. On the other hand usually white-caphackers do not do that,
and black-cap hackers atack commercial software, not free software. So I
have not to protect lists from hackers, but from non-expert people who are
not able, in general, to hack code, but who can easily steel open source.
> The best you can do is label them as true free software and hope that
> an organization such as the FSF will help you fight court battles.
Well, I know very little about the legal implications of Open Source, FSF,
GPL and so forth. I suspect I will have to study a little bit ;-)
> These dictionaries were created by volunteers anyway, right?
Absolutely right.
> So why
> not label them as true free software and let anybody (even commercial
> entities) use them so long as they provide the source.
Digital dictionaries are an expensive resource. Many commercial dictionaries
cost a lot. Nobody will help me anymore to develop new dictionaries by free
if the result of their work is used by companies to sell their own products.
It is very difficult to find people working by free for months to create a
dictionary. English-speaking people are used to have a real huge amount of
dictionaries in Internet involving English language, but this is not true
for most of the other languages. How many Italian-Cherokee or German-Breton
dictionaries you can find in the Web? Our team has dictionaries of
Vietnamese, Votic, Quechua, Mongolian, ancient languages like Etruscan or
Hitti. Many of the are just a way to demonstrate how incredibly rich is our
linguistic capital. We want to preserve that capital.
What you (and other guys) said about Open Source is correct. At least, I
agree with you. I hope to be able to open my code to everybody as soon as
possible. But I need some time to think to all the possible implications. We
had bad experiences in the past, even with some former member of team. We
are careful now ;-)
P.S. If any of the contributors of this NG is interested to see code, I can
share it on a private base agreement, of course. My code is probably not so
good as that one of most of wxWindows experts here, but it is one of the few
that extensively manage Unicode stuff. So, it might be worth to give a look
at it. I am available.
Dario