[ossig] BM word list - release under what license?

[Imran William Smith <iwsmith@mimos.my>]

Hi everybody

As part of MIMOS's assistance with translating OpenOffice
into BM, we are compiling a BM wordlist for use in the
spellchecker.

We are aware that there are already proprietary wordlists
products, but a quick calculation says it should only take
about 5-10 man days to produce a 10k-20k word list, and initial
requests to Dewan Bahasa for a wordlist etc yielded no
results, and I suspect the vendor of the commercial (for
Windows) spellchecker ('Dewan Eja') will be reluctant
to release their word list, especially since adding this to OO.o
makes their product less relevant.  So, instead of long
discussions over the benefits of open source, documentation
licensing etc, it's easier to create outself, and this word
list can forever be  licensed as open.

A few questions:

1) does anyone know what is the approximate vocabulary
size of BM for 'common' documents
2) has anybody done this before, i.e. are we wasting our
time?  Many languages already have an 'ispell' dictionary
but it seems BM doesn't.
3) what license should we release the word list under?
Should we release so it can only be used by open source
apps in future?  How?  Releasing under GFDL doesn't
accomplish that, or does it?  Or would a BSD-style
documentation license be 'doing the right thing' for the
BM, i.e. helping technology move forward using
BM, regardless of the license of the software?

As an aside, there is already a 'en-ms' wordlist licensed
under GFDL we created here, i.e. it's Malaysian-related
words often used in English as spoken in Malaysia (en-ms):


Thanks for your thoughts,

Imran

--
Imran William Smith
Project Manager, Open Source Development, 
MIMOS Berhad, Malaysia

Asian Open Source Centre : http://www.asiaosc.org
MIMOS Open Source        : http://opensource.mimos.my




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