[Spambayes] Re: Practical Applications

[Guido van Rossum]

> Suppose I wanted to build a practical application on spambayes that
> integrated with Outlook but it just couldn't be done as elegantly with
> separate Python code communicating with Outlook via COM.
> 
> Would the open source license spambayes is using allow me to translate
> spambayes into Visual Basic for Applications?????

Sure.  I'd consider it a derivative work so it's still covered by the
PSF license.  Which allows you to distribute it as a binary without
source, though I'd encourage you to also distribute the source, as a
way of giving back to the open source community (not that you haven't
given back already by your math insights).

> I love Python and hate the idea of VBA but whatever gets the job done
> best...  
> 
> also, if translation is allowable, about how many lines of code does
> spambayes have?

Check it out and do a wordcount.  I count 6231 lines in the current
code base, but the tokenizer and classifier together are under 1700
lines total, and the rest is test drivers and deployment code.  OTOH
I don't know what kind of email message parsing VB has, and here I'm
not counting the Python email package.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)