Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The value of computer conferences

I have written earlier about the Holland Open software conference, I was happy to be there and gave a presentation there as well. A conference like this is really valuable, you make contacts and when you have a new project like Ultimate Wiktionary these are really valuable. They may alter the way a project is run. One such contact I had with Mr Bart Knubben of OSOSS. This organisation is about Open Standards and Open Source Software in the Dutch government.

OSOSS is working hard to make the list of properly spelled words maintained by the NTU available for the public. Because of all kinds of contractual restrictions this is not possible at this time. To alleviate this issue, they are working as the focal point of the Dutch Open world to get the list of the NTG, the Nederlandstalige TeX Gebruikersgroep, validated for the spelling. This means that some 222.872 words will be validated.

This list of differently spelled words, comes with indications how the word is to be broken up at the end of a line. When the UW is to host such a list, it will mean some adaptions to the software; we will want to keep track correct spelling. As the Dutch spelling will change in August 2006, it means that we will want to retain the old spelling and mark it as such. As the change of the spelling rules will be in the future, we will have to consider how to deal with this.

When we host a resource like this for the NTG, it means that our license has to be compatible with the NTG. Currently they use the GNU Lesser General Public License. They do not care who uses it under what license as long as it stays Free.

Technically there is this issue; we want to host this data for the NTG. It would be really cool to be the resource for the Open/Free content world and host the Open/Free resource for the Dutch language. It would very much be in line with our objectives. We will find a solution for this issue; one thing is sure the LGPL is not applicaple for a wiki. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

No comments: