Hi;
This is not a technical question so much as an ethical one.
You spend six months casually thinking about an area of personal interest, which is language and words. You play a lot of word games in your spare time like Scrabble and do crosswords etc etc etc. You like anagram puzzles particularly. So you ask yourself where you can get a computer programme that gives you absolutely any valid word or anagram from just any-old combination of letters - in other words the holy grail of anagram puzzlers : one look up to retrieve any possible valid combination of the letters you have. The full monty.
You look for such a programme, and find several good ones on the net and elsewhere, that do bits and pieces of the anagram problem. There are some that can sort out sentences, and return bawdy and hilarious recombinations of the words, poke fun at politicians, and coming up with scatalogical quips. But as far as you can see, there is nothing that does the fundamental task of producing every possible stand-alone word that you can make from any combination of letters.
So you spend another 2 years a) inputting all the words in the English language (including all their plurals and declensions etc. in both US and GB English into your master, base dictionary file) and b) writing a programme that can deliver the goods. You find enormous problems when it comes to completing this work because part a) is highly labour intensive and takes _for ever_ and part b) is difficult because you have to devise an algorithm that can search amongst hundreds of thousands of words, multiple times, since you need to extract each string and each substring, for a range n through 2, where n=wordlength of your anagram letters.
Another year or so later, you have your master dictionary, the algorithm, and eventually a finished product. You live in England and approach English publishers who might be interested in publishing this for you. But becuase you live in England this process takes Neptunium time. Eventually however you find someone at a decision making position in just the publisher you dreamed of, and they say its a good idea and would publish it. You even get them to sign a non-disclosure agreement and everything looks great. But months later again, nothing materialses, and you find that the person who was dealing with the publication has left and gone of to no-one knows where. Your project looks sunk, and since you need to get on with your life outside anagram problems, you leave it to soak again.
Then one day, in quite recent history, you walk into a bookstore to look for a dictionary for your daughter's French class. You browse around the other shelves of dicitionaries, and spot the spine of a book with a title that you hadn't seen before back in your research on the anagram books. You pick it up, open it, and find, hey presto - its your book, implementing your idea, blow by blow, in paperback, with a quite nice price tag, and its published, believe it or not, by the publisher you had first spoken to and had shoen a real interest in publishing wiht you. But, lo and behold, your name is nowhere to be seen on the book. They have ripped off your idea and gone to press with it.
When you stop seething and, months later again, manage to track down the person from the publisher who was originally planning to release it, and you visit her in her new offices since she says to you over the phone how terrible it is to hear what her former employer did with your idea, and that now, in her new role and company, she would be interested in the project again for publication, and you think, great, because this time we wont just publish a book, we'll publish the engine on CD and maybe even the source code for programmers to browse over as well and this will make the book successful. But then, weeks later again, you find that her interest was nothing more than a smokescreen to get her off the hook, probably because you'd tracked her down. She now says she doesnt want to publish it for this and that reason and budgets and overall publishing strategy etc etc. You realise that you may, just may, have been led up the garden path once more, and your prize idea, which you were the first to invent, a complete cross-reference of the English language, a monstrous factorial problem, almost completely overcome just on a desktop PC has been totally hijecked and exploited by somone else - you ask yourself: What Now? And that's my question: what do you do now? Lawyers wont take something like this on unless you stump up some cash in advance to more or less underwrite their possible failure in prosecuting the cause. And without the law, there are no other devices or roads open to you.
So you may decide that the only place you can ask where anyone is likely to have the faintest idea of what went into the programme and how pissed off you can be, is a programmers' forum where someone might be able to give you a useful tip as to what they think could be done to redress the situation.
Let me know if anyone has any ideas.
