Comment by kazinator
1 day ago
I's a generational thing. I would guess that someone who expects applications to phone home, on the off chance that they are actually otherwise local, is likely someone pretty young who hasn't lived in a world of locally installed software that doesn't talk to anything.
If we search for the author's bio, that seems to check out. They are a well-credentialed CS person; obviously they know that dictionary programs such as translation pop ups can have offline dictionaries, and mentions that. But they are a person of their time with an according set of "of courses".
Today, an application being locally installed and works with offline data is like a a statement of quaint chivalry, promulgated by a few remaining Don Quixotes of computing. (It saddens me to say. So much that this analogy brings me insufficient amusement.)
For many languages, there simply isn't a comprehensive dictionary file that could be redistributed legally as part of a free-software offline dictionary application. You either settle for a few thousand words put together by a handful of volunteers, or you redistribute a commercial dictionary illegally, or you have to connect to an online service to provide sufficient coverage legally.
Wiktionary is massive with 1.4M English entries [1] (3x the size of the Merriam Webster's Unabridged dictionary [2], though with a lower average quality), and CC-BY-SA-licensed[3]
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Statistics [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-wo... [3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Copyrights
Yes, the abundance of English data is why I felt the need to point out that this isn't the case for other languages. (Also, the raw count from Wiktionary can be misleading if you don't take into account that there are many low-effort entries for different forms of the same word.)
I could buy the idea of the plugin system itself being desired (e.g. maybe I even want english definitions from Merriam-Webster or something because I like their style more than the open source database) but I think that's separate from what an app does by default. Especially on something like Debian, one should expect a FOSS-first approach whenever reasonable, and for >99% of users the reasonable default is a local dictionary.
Dictionaries are small! It's insane to think that a dictionary requires network access. If it did, why would I install it locally??
> Today, an application being locally installed and works with offline data is like a a statement of quaint chivalry, promulgated by a few remaining Don Quixotes of computing.
But a dictionary package has no valid reason to be online.
Wouldn't someone's expectation instead depend on the nature of the application, and what data it needs? My expectation is that an application does not access the network unless it requires a resource only available from the network. I would totally expect a "Yelp" application to make network requests as part of its core functionality. Yelp is an online service, and in order to use it, you have to talk to the network, and you're generally requesting data that might often change, so you need fresh copies. Same for an Internet browser, or ftp or git (for remotes) or things like that. I would not expect a spell checker to need to access a network because it can all be done locally and the spelling of words doesn't change often enough to need a fresh dictionary from the network over and over. And I certainly would not expect the software to send data to the network. I would also not expect a calculator application to request math function from the network or send my equations to a network service so that the network service could provide a result.
> I's a generational thing
... Is it? Dictionary apps have been working like this for more than twenty years. Babylon Pro of which stardict is pretty much a clone was doing this with already millions of users in the year 2000! Kindles work like that!