Re: new webpage: rikai.com

["Todd Rudick" <trudick@example.com>]

<< GPL it, and if it's any good at all, others will use your code and
give improvements back to you.  (This is a script or applet, therefore
it's being distributed, therefore it _must_ be accompanied by
redistributable source---GPL _is_ effective in _this_ ASP
application.) >>

  Good point (although the javascript is minimal, there is a good analogy 
with bison), but my concern is more than just that it'll get away from me. 
Running the web-server is a monthly cost. Advertising on the site may allow 
me to recoup that, or more (so far, no, but maybe)--If I GPL the thing and 
people put up mirrors all over the place, that's out the window.

  Secondly, my experience with JavaDict, which is GPLed, was not completely 
encouraging. It was ported several times to different languages, and finally 
an excellent version by Marshall Ramsey ended up on the web (on Monash), 
without the source. Marshall's neural-net improvements were far from 
trivial, and (as a result, I believe) nobody's touched it since. I'm not 
really upset or anything, as the thing can be used for free and is quite 
good.

  Lastly, although I'm happy to let regular people use the free server, 
there may be other opportunities if I keep the source private--'nuff said.

<< Or keep it private, and somebody will reimplement it, better with
better content.  And you know what that means. >>
  If somebody has a problem or suggestion for Rikai, I'm all ears. If for 
some reason I can't implement or fix the problem, then it really wouldn't 
make much sense for somebody to go through all the tedium of writing an 
entire mediator, parser, etc., testing on all the browsers out there, etc. 
etc. Talk to me--we'll work something out and get it on the web-server, 
free-to-all (to use, i.e.).

  As for the efficiency concern expressed elsewhere, I don't see that. Rikai 
has excellent connectivity, compresses pages being sent over, will have good 
caching on the dictionaries, etc. I have a test-setup on my own box and get 
much better performance by going to the web-site (in fact, medium to large 
size pages load faster than when I browse them directly, without Rikai!)

cheers,
Todd
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