jurgen85
榜眼
Have you considered making the free parts of Pleco open source? I gather from the legal notices that some dictionaries and components are already open source but I'm talking about the program itself.
I suspect this might make educational institutions more interested in collaboration. Publishers might be less happy but as long as their data and the store is still proprietary I don't see any reason for them to worry. You are already giving the app for free, and the risk of the source code leading to competition is practically zero since they wouldn't have the commercial contracts you have.
In the short term it would enable more technical users to get involved more directly, submit better informed feedback, maybe even patches. In the long term it could also ensure the possibility to support system updates or who knows, even ports to new systems. It would be a shame to lose such an essential program to the winds of time.
I suspect this might make educational institutions more interested in collaboration. Publishers might be less happy but as long as their data and the store is still proprietary I don't see any reason for them to worry. You are already giving the app for free, and the risk of the source code leading to competition is practically zero since they wouldn't have the commercial contracts you have.
In the short term it would enable more technical users to get involved more directly, submit better informed feedback, maybe even patches. In the long term it could also ensure the possibility to support system updates or who knows, even ports to new systems. It would be a shame to lose such an essential program to the winds of time.