Summary and conclusions

There are many good reasons to bring the AGFL Grammar Work Lab into the GNU family:

• there is at present no parser generator for linguistic grammars under GPL
• AGFL can fill a niche that will make GNU attractive to a large number of linguistic users who now live in a Microsoft-dominated world
• AGFL is a well-developed and stable system, which merits availability in the public domain
• a university like ours (the University of Nijmegen) is not in a position to distribute and maintain the system on a commercial basis
• The GPL conventions provide a rational framework for its distribution and use
• the open availability of the source text will invite contributions by others, improving the AGFL software and the associated grammars and lexica, which will ease the maintenance problem.

It is our expectation that the availability of a parser generator for natural language parsers in the public domain will enable not only the development of many new applications, but that the good example of making the software system and the associated grammars and lexica freely available will inspire others to contribute grammars and lexica to the public domain. For computer scientists, this argument may be all too familiar, but for linguists this is a wholly new approach!