[libvoikko] Sámi/HFST , anything new?

[Harri Pitkänen]

On Wednesday 02 June 2010, Flammie Pirinen wrote:
> GPLv2 or at your opinion any later version can be interpreted as GPLv3
> if someone wants to take the incompatibility of GPLv2 vs. Apache 2
> stance.

That's true, but implementations/foma/apply.c (and other Foma files) says 
this:

/*     Foma is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify          
/*     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as     
/*     published by the Free Software Foundation. */

So Foma is not "GPLv2 or at your opinion any later version", it is only GPLv2.

> Furthermore openfst is copied verbatim from the distribution
> and merely linked, currently statically, to libhfst. If this appears to
> be problematic we should probably finally take the time move it to
> dynamic linking and unbundle and require end users to have openfst
> libraries and headers installed.

This may not be enough for Linux distributions. They don't usually distribute 
programs that depend on GPL libraries if the program is not compatible with 
that license. There could be exceptions (if the program can somehow be shown 
to not be a derived work of the library or something like that), I don't know 
if this would fall into that category.

In any case my opinions don't really matter here. The issue would need to be 
solved between authors of Foma, OpenFST and the distributors. Adding "or at 
your opinion any later version" to Foma license would seem like the simplest 
solution to the problem.

Even if the situation could not be solved in a way that would allow including 
HFST 3 in Fedora or Debian it is still possible to have the HFST backend 
enabled in libvoikko. Users could then install the morphologies manually or 
distributions could include HFST 2 and those morphologies that can be built 
with it. But naturally this would not be an ideal solution.

Harri