Copyright infringement and future of Hunspell

[Caolán McNamara]

On Wed, 2017-11-15 at 18:03 +0000, Димитриј Мијоски wrote:
> Hello Nemeth Laszlo,
> 
> I don't see any copyright infringement, as Hunspell allowed LGPLv2.1
> or later, which safely allows us to put out derivative work to
> LGPLv3.

Sure, if you were forking hunspell to create something else and decided
to use that provision for the new work. But it's another thing to
modify the license of the preexisting hunspell over against the wishes
of the author.

I suggest a possible approach here. Currently hunspell has two main
dirs in it, src/hunspell for the classic code and src/hunspell2 for
your proposed successor with a shared toplevel dir with the license
statement, etc. While https://github.com/hunspell lists the current
hunspell related repositories of hunspell, myspell and mythes.

Why not add hunspell2 (or junspell) as a new work in a new repository
at that higher level, move src/hunspell2 from hunspell to the new repo
and copy whatever shared stuff is needed. Restore the old license stuff
for the classic hunspell repository and work away on the successor in
the separate repo under the hunspell umbrella.

> As for the license, I really don't see what is the problem with
> LGPLv3.

IANAL, but the existing consumers are known to work with the classic
license situation. Some of these consumers (e.g. the static linked and
unknowns of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunspell) may be unable or
unwilling (as a general policy) to use LGPLv2 vs the current
possibility of the MPL.