[Asterisk-Dev] Text to speech on Asterisk

[astdev at newww.com]

On 15-Nov-03 John Todd wrote:
> I would encourage this path, since I think Cepstral sounds great, and 
> seems to be easier to tune than Festival.  Here is the person at 
> Cepstral that I've exchanged mail with, and he was very excited to 
> learn of Asterisk's use of their modules:
> 
> Kevin Lenzo (CTO) lenzo at cepstral.com
> 
> JT

Thanks John - I already exchanged emails with him on Friday before you
posted. He seems rather enthusiastic about supporting Cepstral with
Asterisk. Regarding the GPL license, I'm sure we can work it out. I 
believe that what I'm planing will abide by it. We write app_TTS for
Asterisk that is full GPL, it is built with along with all the other
apps and doesn't require any non-GPL headers. app_TTS uses a simple 
protocol to communicate with any back-end TTS server that implements
that protocol. I write a non-GPL glue code / server wrapper for the TTS
engine, starting with Festival and Cepstral.

Kevin offered that they would be glad to support the release of such
glue code. 

Regarding Marks GPL comments -

On 15-Nov-03 Mark Spencer wrote:
> I think we at digium could make/sell the Cepestral app if we can get a
> hold of the folks there.  In any case, such an app would have to come
> through us since to get an exception, as otherwise it would be in
> violation of GPL.

I found this a little alarming - Could you clarify GPL issues regarding
Asterisks apps in general? I assume you are referring to the fact that an
app would need to use GPL headers to be built for Asterisk and hence 
needs to be GPL itself or "excepted" by Digium? I hope that splitting
the GPL and non-GPL parts via a protocol and pipes avoids this.

        Dave

----------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Belser