Number to Words and licencing

[John Ralls]

On Nov 1, 2013, at 11:14 AM, Thomas Troesch <ttroesch at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have been looking at the list of open bugs for check printing.  Bug
> 626001 asks for number to words based on locale.
> 
> One approach would be to provide for locale specific plug-ins or code
> paths.  For a programmer its a simple way to think about it, but I don't
> know how well that would work with translators.
> 
> I found some open source code that has a rule based parser to support
> NLSnumber translations.  The rules themselves may be too much for the
> typical
> translator.
> 
> Before I dig into it to see if it would work for checks ( looks promising
> ), I'd like to have an opinion regarding license compatibility.
> 
> From the web ( icu-project.org ):
> "The ICU projects since ICU 1.8.1 and ICU4J 1.3.1 are covered by the ICU
> license <http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/icu/trunk/license.html> ,
> a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with
> the GNU GPL.".  The license is at "http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/
> icu/trunk/license.html".  The function that I'm interested in is described
> at "RuleBasedNumberFormat" at the bottom of "http://userguide.icu-
> project.org/formatparse/numbers".  Class documentation is at "http://icu-
> project.org/apiref/icu4c/classRuleBasedNumberFormat.html".
> 
> I have no intuition as to whether bringing in a lump of code like this
> would make sense.  Opinions and insight welcome.

The ICU license isn’t on the FSF-approved list [1], but it’s pretty close to
the BOOST license [2], which is, and which is approved. However, it includes one
extra clause that’s somewhat annoying: The requirement to document the
copyright not only in the code but also in all supporting documentation. That
sort of thing can get a bit onerous: See the FSF discussion about the original
BSD license [3]. Compatibility [4] comes down to whether it’s OK to combine
the work in question with a work released under the GPL, and if the authors
say it is, I guess they know best.

Lifting code out of other projects is asking for trouble: Either we become 
responsible for maintaining that new code or we have to expend significant
effort to keep in sync with the original tree. Much better to make it a
dependency and link it.

That said, while I think we’re trying to reduce dependencies rather than add
them, ICU is easily the best cross-platform FOSS I18N/L10N library available.
It has one problem: Its translation facility is utterly incompatible with 
gettext, and gettext is what almost all FOSS translators are used to. That can
be avoided by continuing to use gettext for translation and using ICU for
everything else… but that’s perhaps a bit bigger job than what you’re willing
to sign up for. OTOH it seems dumb to use ICU for just number->numeric text
formatting.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
[2] http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Boost1.0
[3] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
[4] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIsCompatible