#756 F17 Feature: English Typing Booster - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/english-typing-booster
Closed None Opened 12 years ago by rbergero.

For 2012-01-23 meeting.


This request was approved at the 2012-01-23 meeting.

We would also like to get legal folks to look at the dictionary content here and confirm licensing.

Added spot to cc: list.

From the maintainer of the feature:

{{{
The information on the Feature page about the source of the dictionary was unfortunately incorrect and has now been corrected.

1) Licensing of dictionary
The feature says:
Create dictionary tables from wikipedia dumps for English. [done]

The english-typing-booster dictionary is currently actually derived from the stardict-dic-en package, which is under MIT license, and not from Wikipedia dumps.
I just have released english-typing-booster-0.0.2 under an MIT license, and built it for F15 and F16.

We are planning to try and see if hunspell dictionaries can't be used instead and help provide support for many more languages.

2) Licensing of works created by using this

The feature involves using the dictionary data as predictive input.
A point was raised that, depending on how the predicitive input works,
works created by this predicitive input might be considered derivative works.

The prediction of words with respect to English-typing-booster means, one can then simply select the desired word from a list of
suggestions. English typing booster helps to improve one's typing speed and spelling.
So work created by using English typing booster, we can not consider as its derivative.
}}}

It's on spot (or legal) decision. Nothing for meeting today.

AFAIK, given the clarifications above, it's a non-issue.

The stardict-dic-en dictionary comes from WordNet, which is clearly MIT. Other stardict dictionaries are not as clear, and some of the chinese ones are simply being used by stardict without permission.

If this feature is limited explicitly to the WordNet English dictionary, there are no legal concerns. Any additional dictionaries would need to be carefully reviewed before being used/included in Fedora.

Accepted at fesco meeting 06-02-2012.

Login to comment on this ticket.

Metadata