created on 21 Jun 2006, by Unknown IP Address, read more…
I was just now talking to Brett, who's been working on Spell Check for the past few weeks. One of the difficulties Firefox 2.0 faces is that there's no compatibly licensed pan-language dictionary. We're using MySpell now, which is LGPL for English only, I think. From what I'm told, we'd really like to use ASpell, because their dictionaries are way better, but because they are GPL, we can't. IANAL, so I can't give all the reasoning behind any of this.
What this means anyway is that we have an dictionary for English now that marks "Firefox" as a misspelling and our experience for users in other languages is that they have to manually go and download a dictionary. That sucks.
It'd be great if ASpell was also available under a compatible license, or some other compatibly licensed dictionary of similar quality were to emerge.