Hi again. Guess it's up to me now to keep this blog rolling with interesting Open Source stuff.

I just got home from this autumns first Open Tuesday event (Club Ahjo, Helsinki). They celebrated Linux 15 year birthday with a panel on where Open Source is going. I celebrated the publication of the English edition with a glass of red wine, sponsored by IBM (Open Bar). Kind of like that guy on the cover, talking to the penguin.

After the official program I heard one gossip in particular that is newsworthy. (And I'm happy to be the first to blog about this, as Petri Räsänen lives in Tampere so he is not home yet :-) I'm sure this will be on the frontpage of COSS.fi tomorrow. According to this rumour Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus, in other words, the linguistics academy or something like that, has decided to publish it's database of the complete Finnish vocabulary as LGPL on their website.

This is great news, because there is no free spell checker for Finnish yet. For OpenOffice there exists a free-but-not-free (you know what I mean) spell checker Soikko, but of course that's a pain in the ass since you must install it separately. (Ok so it seems to exist in Debian non-free, so it's convenient enough, just not really free.) So COSS actually had started a project to create a new and free spell checking dictionary in Finnish, but this kind of solves their problems in one blow.

And hopefully, if there are other languages out there still with this same problem, you can now refer to this and say that they are already did it in Finland. Go and lobby your linguistics academy. If their job was funded with taxpayers money anyway, we should all benefit from it, I think?

Now that I look at the website, I realise it is the centre of domestic languages, so does that mean they will publish a Swedish vocabulary too? Maybe. Look at the COSS.fi website tomorrow for more news.