Comments

Hello,

Congratulations for your project :)

My question is simple, why not use also LGPL?

If we could put this module in a commercial software, using LGPL would be mandatory to commit any modifications to the source code (that would bring more coders and investment into this module).

This would be fair for the community, it would bring more people and more investment, and wouldn't be anti-enterprise. Would be the best of both worlds.

Not all enterprises are evil. There are good enterprises that bring innovation, create jobs, pay taxes and make a good contribution to the world. The problem is when those companies become too greedy to share any innovation. Thats why LGPL is so nice.

Think about it :)

Cya 

Be very careful in the way you license this data. If you release a great collection of GPL data, and someone else releases a great collection of data under, for example, a CC-by license, it will probably be illegal to combine the two corpuses and make a working speech recognition product.

I have been involved in 2 projects that went through immense pain because of this issue. The solution is as follows:

1. Set up a proper legal entity to hold the data (an organisation).
2. Make sure the organisation has good governance that end users will approve of.
3. Make end users assign a non-exculsive irrevokeable perpetual license to the organisation for the organisation do to whatever it democratically decides in future.

If you don't make this clear right from the start, any attempt to change the license, for whatever reason, will be impossible.

For example, if a court rules that using a subset of the data derived from VoxForge on a hand-held device doesn't comply with the source code rule, and you have to bundle gigabytes of data in order to use VoxForge derived engines on mobile devices, you will be back to square one, and will have to start collecting data all over again. Who knows why a court may do that, but unless you can be sure, you can't risk not assigning data.

The organisation could have in it's constitution, (terms of incorporation or whatever it's called in the relevant jurisdiction) that it will always make the data available under the GPL, but may additionally make it available under other licenses.