Ken Hi,

I'am waiting for the FSF answer to go on with my work on the Wiktionary.

So, from what I understand we have no valid answer atm.

We have to wait for a Human Being from the FSF to take a look.

If in the answer is YES then I'll give you my script (python) so that everyone will be able to make extractions and to improve the script.

Thanks,

Samuel

Hi Samuel,

OK, thanks,

Ken

FSF Reply:

from Yoni Rabkin via RT <[email protected]> reply-to [email protected] to [email protected] date Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 12:38 PM subject [gnu.org #379498] Re: Using GFDL derived work in GPL Pronunciation Dictionary mailed-by gnu.org

hide details Oct 18 (2 days ago)

Reply

Hello,

Please accept our apologies for the delay in getting back to you. We
rely on volunteer effort and often have difficulties keeping up with the
demand for our expertise.

> I am the Web Admin for the VoxForge (www.voxforge.org) project. We are
> collecting speech from people from all around the world in order to
> create a speech corpus that can be used to generate "acoustic models"
> for Free and Open Source speech recognition engines. All submitted
> speech is licensed under the GPL.

> Part of the process in the creation of an acoustic model requires that the
> pronunciations of all the words in the corpus be known beforehand (there are
> rule-based, and statistical, approaches to determining the pronunciation of
> an unknown word, but manually created pronunciations are more accurate...).
> We have a pronunciation dictionary that was originally licensed under BSD,
> and our modifications have been licensed under the GPL.

> We are working on increasing the number of words in the VoxForge
> pronunciation dictionary, which has about 130,000+ pronunciations in it.
> The English Wiktionary has around 192,665 English words, and we would like
> to merge these pronunciations with the VoxForge pronunciation dictionary,
> but we are not sure about the compatibility between the GDFL license, which
> it what the English Wikitionary is licensed under, and the GPL, which is
> used by VoxForge.

> Question: can we combine the pronunciations from the English Wikitionary
> (licenced under GDFL) with the pronunciations from the VoxForge
> pronunciation dictionary (licensed under GPL), and distribute the combined
> work under GPL?

Both the GFDL and the GPL are strong copyleft licenses, making them
incompatible. Neither have explicit compatibility clauses to make them
compatible (for example between the GPL and Affero GPL).

Moreover, the GPL and GFDL were designed to license different kinds of
works, one for free software, and the second for the manuals which
accompany free software. This, if anything, exacerbates their
incompatibility.

As much as I would personally like it to be otherwise, the GPL and GFDL
are incompatible. At this point in time, I think that it would be best
to try and obtain a copy of the English Wikitionary data under a GPL
compatible license.

I'm sorry I could not have been of more help. If you have any more
questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I'll do my best to expedite my
reply.

--
I am not a lawyer, the above is not legal advice

  Regards, Yoni Rabkin

Hi! I was able to import a big French Sphinx lexicon. Maybe someone is interested to train a few French words with simon?