Re: Aspell-en license Once again.

[Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>]

Ugh, please respect the MFT header because the Aspell maintainer is not
subscribed to d-l.

Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> writes:

> Scripsit Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org>
>
[snip]
>> Probably.  I've tried to argue that it's impossible to plagiarize that
>> which is unoriginal,
>
> Several other people have tried to argue that a word list is not
> necessarily unoriginal. There are thousands to words that have to be
> judged either on the list or off the list; these thousands of
> choices are fully as much an intellectual expressive choice as the
> choice of which words to put in which order to form a novel.

Alright, then consider this.  Since a word list in a dictionary has a
questionable copyright, it must be removed from a dictionary.  Then,
people notice some common words no longer exist in the dictionary, so
they add them.  Eventually, every missing word will be added back to the
dictionary, so that the end result is identical to the original.

Thus, we'd have two identical dictionaries, one of which is "free" and
one of which is "non-free".  Yet, the free list did not in any way
plagiarize the non-free one.

Have you ever heard of two original novels independently written that
were identical to each other?  No, that's inconceivable.  But it's
completely conceivable for two independently compiled dictionaries to be
identical, or very nearly so.  Are those still original works?

-- 
People said I was dumb, but I proved them!