[tex-hyphen] I am coding a mobile that uses TeX hyphen file...

[Christopher Camacho]

Hello,
OK, I have included links to hyphen files in the following languages:
Afrikaans, Assamese, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, US English, British English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, German (1996), German (Swiss), Greek (mono), Greek (poly), Icelandic, Italian, Kurmanji, Lithuanian, Mongolian,  Norwegian, Norwegian (nynorsk), Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh , Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian and Welsh.
Essentially, user of my product just has to click on a button with link and relevant hyphen file is downloaded into a folder on app I am developing.
If there are any languages/links you would like me to remove, please let me know.
I have removed all files with GPL in them. Some have all of MIT, GPL and LGPL licences:
Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi (Punjabi), Tamil and Telugu
I have excluded those too as I do not have resources to investigate whether I can use them.
I think LPPL is OK for me to use – it’s nothing like GPL, but vague see link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licences
Hyphenation is only a small part of product I am developing. It can easily work without hyphenation. However, hyphenation gives a much better layout. For that, I am grateful. If my venture is profitable I feel I certainly should contribute a percentage of my profits to TUG who maintain and produce the hyphen files.
Is that not a win-win scenario? Supposing I made my code available to all. Someone else would distribute it and I would make no money at all. As a result, I would have nothing to contribute to TUG either.

Kind Regards,

Christopher Camacho

From: David G<mailto:somloieater at gmail.com>
Sent: 08 October 2021 21:45
To: Christopher Camacho<mailto:christopher_g_camacho at hotmail.com>
Cc: TeX Hyphenation and beyond<mailto:tex-hyphen at tug.org>
Subject: Re: [tex-hyphen] I am coding a mobile that uses TeX hyphen file...

Not a lawyer either, but I expect that if you kept
contagious/non-distributable hyphenation files out of your app,
included the ones you could,
and then allowed users to import other dictionaries they'd found on
the network or written themselves then you'd be reasonably safe.
It would raise the hurdle for users, but your code would not then be
including the copyrighted files, after all.

Can I point out, though, that 'I can't afford to make my work open
source', is quite easily countered by the counter-argument 'don't
think you can profit from the hard work of others for free, then'. I
expect that what you *should* be asking is not how you can avoid GPL,
but how you
can get in contact with the respective authors to say to them "I hope
to make X from each sale of this closed-source app, and it would be
neat if it could
include your work, can we reach some kind of deal for a separate
commercial licence?"

David

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