[Asterisk-Dev] Text to speech on Asterisk

[Olle E. Johansson]

Joseph Riss wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-11-15 at 18:27, astdev at newww.com wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>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.
> 
> [..]
> 
> i was wondering why festival would need a "non-GPL glue code / server
> wrapper for the TTS engine" ?
> cepstral is commercial but isn't festival 'free for unrestricted use'
> according to it's license?

The problem is in the Asterisk licensing, where Digium prefers to have
copyright on the Asterisk code base, and have two licensing schemes,
one commercial and one GPL Open Source. They can't include GPL
code in the commercial code base, nor can't they include commercial
third-party code like Cepstral in the GPL version.

That's why only Digium can create commercial channels or applications
as additions to Asterisk. And that's why the MySQL support was taken
out of the Asterisk code base and moved to an add-on GPL module.



/Olle