WaKan Project Website

[Bushman]

Hi.

I think that wakan needs to be released as open source soon or someone will get pissed off and rewrite it for linux and you my dear Filip, you will be considered as M$ fanboy.

Can't you see that so many people want wakan on their linux/mac machines?
And think of all those who don't write about it on the forums!

I think you'v done great job with wakan and you should take all the credits but you should know where the border is... let others do something for this project too or it will die, it's about time!

best regards,
Bushman

PS: hope to see linux version of wakan soon!

[z-one]

Dear Bushman,

I hope you were only joking and nobody will be so pissed off to REWRITE WAKAN FOR LINUX!!!

I don't believe making Wakan open source helps that much. As far as I know it was written in Delphi (and not with CLX but VCL) so it is connected to Windows too much. This is just my opinion but I faintly remember Filip mentioning this once too.
Anyway Wakan is written and owned by Filip and he does what he wants with it. He must be greatly concerned about being called an M$ fanboy though. (I remember a great movie trilogy where the protagonist couldn't stand being called "chicken" but it was a comedy not a serious true story.)

I don't use linux nor mac but I would need a great dictionary on those machines too if I were, so I can imagine the frustration of thousands of would be users. But why has Filip anything to do with this? There are free programs for linux integrating EDICT or JMDict. Ask their authors for the source. The user interface has to be rewritten from scratch anyway, isn't it?

This of course shouldn't stop Filip from releasing the source if he wanted to. It just doesn't seem likely to help the development of such program for Linux and Mac. (And even if it does, he shouldn't be bugged as he doesn't really owe us anything.)

I can be wrong in all of the above, but still. I think people only bug Filip because he'd done a program like Wakan once, so they think he can do it again for some other platform. (Yes he could, but so could you! - if you can use the source anyway)

PS. I don't want to protect Filip, he can do it himself if he wants to. These were only my thoughts.
_________________
ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[yokozuki]

I agree that this request is rather, um, forceful. The designer made this for us in his free time; it's a gift as is.

But I agree from a different angle. The problem with closed source code isn't that Linux users can't run it; Wakan works adequately on Wine. The problem is that closed source code is naturally inferior to open source code. It can't be modified, it can't be maintained, it can't be ported or improved or built upon except by the people who hold the key (very few).

The fact that someone might "rewrite" Wakan is a shame. The point of free software is to create an open platform, a platform where innovations and improvements build on each rather than remaining isolated and hidden in binary. Closed source Wakan is good, but it can only every be Wakan. Open sourced Wakan gives a toolset to future programmers and provides a shoulder to climb to new heights.

To Wakan, releasing the source code doesn't mean taking up the dirty and unpleasant task of development and adapting Wakan further; it merely allows other people to do so.

[z-one]

I'm not against open source but I don't like forcing fellow developers, that's all. There is always a reason why we don't share our source files.

I only said that the Wakan source can't help anyone who wants to rewrite it for Linux or Mac (the reason why Bushman opened this topic in the first place), because there are many open source projects like this already. What made Wakan great is it's user interface.
_________________
ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[tony]

I thought Bushman's original post was pretty offensive, and I chose not to respond. But I do want to respond to the discussion between z-one and yokozuki.

I agree that one of the greatest strengths of WaKan is its user interface, and that access to the source code will not help other developers much in achieving a similar UI on other platforms. (By the way, I think this forum helped Filip a great deal to improve WaKan's UI; early versions of WaKan had much of the power of recent versions, but the UI was cluttered and complicated to tailor to one's needs. Filip was very responsive to suggestions made by people in the forum, and came up with some excellent ideas of his own to tie them together.)

Another of WaKan's primary strengths, however, is the successful combination of database information from a large number of separate sources, and the internal routines to fetch this information and do searches in the combined data sources. These are the parts of the source code which would be most useful to other developers, and it is a bit unfortunate for this wheel to have to be reinvented. I do not know of any open source projects which have comparable functionality in this regard. That it is possible to reinvent this wheel is evidenced by z-one's work on zKanji, which duplicates most of Wakan's search capabilities and even adds some improvements. But I am sure that this cost z-one a considerable amount of time and effort.

I don't think Filip is unwilling to open source the code; I think the problem is that it would take considerable time and effort to modify the code so that it would be usable in this way. And if Filip, who has already contributed a large amount of time and effort to all of us who use WaKan, does not choose to spend more time doing this, I think we need to accept that choice and be grateful for all that he has already given us.

[z-one]

There are free "engines" to index and look up words fast and anyone could use those if they wanted to write a dictionary that can do anything wakan or zkanji does. Even letting mysql do the hard work without any special preparation is fast enough.

Writing the database searches for zkanji only took me a lot of time because I wanted to make it all on my own, that's all. Filip might have made wakan for the same reason, which explains why he doesn't want to share it's source. Creating a successful user interface is hard and long work though.
_________________
ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[sen666]

Hey there to everyone! I am following Wakan since about 3 years ago. I share some of the opinions mentioned and have many problems-difficulties with the program as mentioned by the years passed by by fellow community members. I think the effort given into this program can be seen by the number of users continuously suggesting new ideas to support and renew the program. In my opinion it is rather unfortunate, sad maybe, that after so many suggestions over the last 2+ almost nothing new was done (no new or even beta versions) to adopt or try to develop them(ideas/suggestions). I am not so sure of how I should respond to the question of "OpenSource" but I think that with such supporting community there ought to be a new and much better(maybe the best?) Wakan. As one of the many "self-learning Japanese" group member hope I can see a new Wakan soon, as indeed many years have passed without having any progress at all...

[tony]

sen666,

I suggest that you try out z-one's program, zkanji, available at http://zkanji.sourceforge.net/ . It is a different program than WaKan, but z-one was inspired by some of Filip Kabrt's ideas, and has implemented much of what WaKan does, sometimes with significant improvements in UI. He has also added some of the features that users wanted for a long time in WaKan.

Jishuu wa ganbatte ne.

tony

P.S.: It's nice to see a real posting in here for a change. Recently, they've all been made by bots for the purpose of placing irrelevant advertising links in the forum.

[akickintheteeth]

Another mac user here voting for open source.