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Spell Checking and Vocabulary Licenses

We plan to use the DevExpress spell checker. This component uses dictionary files, such as:

1 - Hunspell
2 - ISpell
3 - OpenOffice

Our software is commercial, closed source. These are the licenses used by the specified dictionaries:

1 - Hunspell uses three GPL, LGPL and MPL licenses (I really don't understand this)
2 - iSpell uses free GNU documentation

3 - I do not know what license OpenOffice dictionaries use.

I am not an expert, but I think that these licenses cannot be used in commercial software, or if we do, we must provide the full source code of the application.

It's true? Which of these dictionaries can be safely used in a commercial product?

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2 answers

Which of these dictionaries can be safely used in a commercial product?

As far as I know, all this is available under the OSI Certified Free Software License. A free software license permits commercial use. You only need to comply with the terms of use, as in any settings.

You should also do some search queries for your components, for example. first, hunspell

Hunspell is a spell checking tool for LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox 3 and Thunderbird, Google Chrome, and is also used by proprietary software such as Mac OS X, memoQ, Opera, and SDL Trados.

If other proprietary software can use it, I wonder why you can’t?

I am not an expert, but I think that these licenses cannot be used in commercial software, or if we do, we must provide the full source code of the application.

No, three licensing means that you can choose one of these three, OR not AND . For example, LGPL is a weak copyleft license, and you do not need to specify the source code of the full application, but only the library. I suggest you read all of these three licenses and choose the one that suits you best.

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GPL dictionaries can usually be used with non-free software, since they are considered a collection. For this to be the case, they must be stored as separate text files; they cannot be compiled or obfuscated.

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