Getting Involved

Get Involved

You, too, can support open-source projects:

In my Master's degree in 2009, I used OpenOffice for most of the tasks. Back then, its dictionaries were poor and there wasn't a grammar checker for it with Portuguese rules.

As a result, my individual essays had several flaws and I didn't get brilliant marks.

I did get a brilliant mark in my dissertation, but I bought Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student to write it, and I learned about grammar rules while writing the dissertation. I learned things I never dreamed of regarding grammar, such as having the foreign words italicized in Portuguese writing.

I am currently maintaining the open-source British speller, helping to improve the Portuguese speller, as well as creating Portuguese grammar rules and the Portuguese morphologic dictionary for LanguageTool, among other things.

Things are improving a lot and this software can already be used for most written tasks for university, commercial and personal usage. Now people will have the chance I didn't have back in 2009.

Open-source software is becoming as good or better than commercial one, since we have the best/most dedicated team around. Some visionaries traced the path of humankind regarding free software decades ago. Indeed, “there were giants in those days (…) and their footsteps can still be felt today and throughout eternity (…)”, and today we still have brilliant people following their philosophy.

Like Shantanu once said: developing open-source is a lifetime task, to be done without rush at our own pace without many deadlines obligations.

Once, in a philosophical chat with JD, we spoke that the nation whose workers would work for free, would be the most powerful nation on Earth. The same happens with open-source: we work for free, so no one can match us, and the power users are noticing us. People who can’t afford expensive commercial software or who prefer “open standards” can find free replacements.

Today there are tons of books with the same title, “The Art of War”, applying the concepts of Sun Tzu to many fields, from marketing to management. This Chinese General and strategist, born in 544 BC, even today has a major impact on society. The quote above in our case means: “Know the competition and your software, and you will win.”

I donate my time, knowledge, and resources to the community so that people can have the best for free. After knowing my illness, I went to three Medical Committees and retired for disability after receiving the letter from the Social Security on 2.Dec.2022. This means I can dedicate my time almost fully to open-source, my greatest passion. A friend said that certainly the divine plan was taking place.

Together, we will change the world! We will make the world a better place to live for current and future generations. I have a dream: a spiritual, scientific and technological advanced civilisation with space travel technology, where life instead of price has value, happening in my lifetime.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Mozilla:
— British Dictionary
I have been responsible for the British dictionary since 2013, since it was not maintained any more; thus I forked it.

I pioneered concepts in this area, such as logging all the words added/changed to dictionaries, including possessive forms.

Open-source projects usually “borrow” the dictionaries from LibreOffice, which means that even if software and Linux users (at least Debian based Linux distributions) don't know I am behind the British dictionary, chances are they are using my version. People can only know by editing the dictionaries files manually.

Linux had 3.5 billion users in 2022: https://findly.in/how-many-linux-users-are-there

This is the magnitude of things, although my name doesn't appear in the OS, if users choose to use the British language on Linux, chances are they will be getting my dictionary.

If you find a word that appears as a typo, and you are sure it isn't, please e-mail it to me for analysis. If it exists in dictionaries such as Oxford or Collins, I will add it.

Please share your private wordlist if you feel there are very basic/common words missing.

You may also open a ticket on GitHub:

https://github.com/marcoagpinto/aoo-mozilla-en-dict

On 16.Oct.2021 I was quite touched with this Firefox review:

On 2.Feb.2022 I was also quite touched with this Firefox review:

— Portuguese Dictionary
Tiago Santos forked the Minho University Portuguese dictionary in 2017 and added a huge number of words to it.

There is still a huge number of words missing or incorrect.

The project LanguageTool has internal dictionaries which are added to the software where it is used, extending OpenOffice/LibreOffice's dictionaries, so you can report missing words/typos to the Portuguese team in GitHub (see the link below).

— LanguageTool
I am creating the Portuguese rules, spelling and morphologic dictionary for LanguageTool, along with some other individuals.

I joined the team in 2012 and have dedicated a lot of time to rewriting XML rules with obsolete code with recent code, since initially the postag dictionaries were poor.

My goal is to rewrite rules with recent code attempting to produce the same results and then improve them for better results, achieved by using all the knowledge I have acquired over the years.

The tests I conduct while creating the rules are using the pt-BR (Brazilian) corpus, since the pt-PT (Portugal) is very limited.

LanguageTool is the most powerful grammar checker around, above any possible competition. I suggest everyone to check their university essays, dissertations and theses with it. Even if you use Microsoft Word, you can open the documents with LibreOffice just to check the grammar, like I did with my PhD thesis, which I also used to get ideas for rules as I revised it.

There is a free and a Premium (paid) version of LanguageTool, which checks more characters and has extra rules for the supported languages developed by a team of professional linguists.