Wish that we could, but there are a lot of problems with open-sourcing Pleco:
1) Much of our DRM security comes through the fact that nobody knows how our DRM system (or even our database file format) works - "security through obscurity" is a fairly sound concept if you're as tiny as we are, the hackers capable of breaking even a weak DRM system have better things to do with their time - so even though the encryption keys would still be private, and even if we perhaps also kept the encryption code private (though that would be tricky, I guess we'd need a BSD license or something that allowed for easy mixing of open-source and non-open-source code) we'd be putting our licensees' content at great risk by exposing the file formats / software internals in that way.
2) The code isn't pretty, to be honest; it's gone through a lot of adventures over the years from its early days on Palm OS, still uses concepts like handles that most developers never have to deal with anymore.
3) We'd still have the burden of supporting the resulting product, since we'd still be selling it, along with guaranteeing it / providing bug-fix updates for it / etc even if the open-source community were helping, but now we'd be doing that with code we didn't know as well / code that hadn't been developed according to our usual conventions.
4) The help is unlikely to be enough to make much of a difference - we'd spend almost as much time coordinating this effort / explaining how everything works as we would just doing the work ourselves. (seriously, there's a TON of work that would need to be done to get Pleco on Android) c.f. The Mythical Man Month.
If you're really motivated to see a better Chinese dictionary on Android, though, why not start an open-source project yourself to develop one? There are a few other programmers in this thread alone who seem equally interested in seeing the Chinese situation on Android improve. There was a project years ago called PADict that came out with a really neat Japanese dictionary for Palm OS (still around at
http://padict.sourceforge.net/ actually) - like Pleco, it included handwriting input, stroke order diagrams, flashcards, etc - but I haven't seen anything open-source on that scale for mobile devices since; most of the open-source projects for mobiles tend to be shells for database formats like StarDict and have little ambition beyond that. If you aren't happy with CC-CEDICT, contribute to making it better (checking definitions against other dictionaries, say), or start writing publishers about getting older / more obscure dictionaries released free for open-source use. Flashcards would be easy with a "real" open-source project since you'd have access to the GPLed code for Anki / Mnemosyne / etc; those aren't accessible to us in any case, since incorporating GPLed code would necessitate releasing all of our other source code including DRM.
So honestly, I think the open-source approach could really work great for a Chinese dictionary made from scratch - people get extremely passionate about even tiny UI changes / rare bugs in Pleco, understandable given how many hours a day many of them spend using it, which means you'd likely have an easy time motivating folks to contribute. I just don't think it would work so well for us - juggling content / code module licenses and open-source is very very challenging, and the benefits over a wholly open-source Chinese dictionary project wouldn't be enough to justify the extra burdens.
