Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Hold your horses!  I am concerned that promoting 'dict' is going in
the wrong direction.  I don't know all the facts, so I won't assert
that it is a problem; but we need to check.

The program 'dict' seems to be intended to access dictionaries on
internet servers.  Probably on servers that don't belong to the user.

Does it have the ability to use a locally stored dictionary?  That's
what we should encourage -- not dependence on servers by default.

'dict -D' gave me a list of dictionaries that the program knows about.
I presume these are found on various servers.  It does not say what their
licenses are.  Which of those dictionaries is downloadable with
a free license?

There IS a free English dictionary that people can download.  It is
Wiktionary, packaged by kiwix.  It uses a special format, .zim, that
is compact and suitable for searching.  That project packages
Wiktionary for various languages.

Does the dict program have the ability to access a dictionary
in that format?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)