[mary-users] German voice proprietary? Clarification needed.

[Marc Schroeder]

Dear Klaus Knopper,

first of all, thank you for creating Knoppix -- an excellent tool that I 
have used many times.

As the main developer and team leader of MARY TTS development at DFKI, I 
will try to answer your questions.

In essence, your perception of the current license issue is correct -- 
there are two parts:

* OpenMary is open source, under a BSD-style license; it encompasses the 
core of the system, including the unit selection code, the voice 
building and signal processing tools, as well as the Tibetan and most of 
the English modules;

* DFKIMary is the part that we cannot make open source for a variety of 
reasons; the best we could do for the community was to release it for 
download under a research license. It encompasses the German modules and 
voices, and the English part-of-speech tagger.

In other words, you are free to use OpenMary in whichever way you like; 
to re-distribute, change, etc., even sell. But DFKIMary you cannot reuse 
in this way. So indeed, on the basis of the current license, you cannot 
distribute a German-speaking MARY TTS system, but an English-speaking 
system is no problem. This qualifies your interpretation that "the 
software as a whole is non-distributable".

The choice of a BSD-style license for OpenMary was motivated by the wish 
to be compatible with both "free" (in the sense of the GPL) and 
closed-source (as in DFKIMary) code. Within the limits of our 
constraints, this combination was the most liberal we could do.


What kind of time and work would you have liked to invest into the 
development and evaluation of the MARY TTS system?

If you have a concrete use in mind, I suggest you contact me directly 
(not via the list), and we can discuss possibilities for providing 
DFKIMary components under a different license for a specific purpose. I 
am not promising anything, but discussing options may be worth the time.

Best regards,
Marc Schröder


Klaus Knopper schrieb:
> Hello list,
> 
> Could please anybody with a authoritative legal voice from DFKI clarify
> the license which the german tts part of mary uses?
> 
>>From the DFKI webpage:
> 
> "In addition, German synthesis is released under a DFKI research
> license."
> 
> This is already a little shock, considering that Mary is supposed to be
> Open Source, but together with the german voice, it isn't.
> 
> Excerpts from the license:
> 
> "The software must no be made available to third parties."
> 
> "(2) The Licensed Software may only be used by the Licensee on the
>  Licensee's electronic data processing (EDP) systems."
> 
> "(4) The Licensed Software is to be used by the Licensee
>  exclusively for the purpose of non-commercial use. Further
>  development or commercial use of the Licensed Software or parts
>  thereof requires the prior written consent of the Licensor."
> 
> These conditions would render the german voice unusable for me and many
> other developers, for example for a desired purpose of using mary as a
> screenreader for open source software distributions, for commercial as
> well as for non-commercial use. It is not an Open Source license, and
> the software as a whole is non-distributable. If this is the case, what
> sense does it make for us to follow the german voices development? It
> won't be part of any commercial-grade software or even
> community-project, ever. Putting time and work in its development
> and evaliation would be a waste.
> 
> Please let me know if my observation is correct.
> 
> With kind regards
> -Klaus Knopper
> _______________________________________________
> Mary-users mailing list
> Mary-users at dfki.de
> http://www.dfki.de/mailman/listinfo/mary-users
> 

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher
DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
--
official DFKI coordinates:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313