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CMU Sphinx Open Sourced
Mandrake wrote in: "CMU Sphinx (the speech recognition software being developed at CMU being
funded by DARPA and NSF for the last 15 years) has gone open source and is up
for download on SourceForge. You can
check out the announcement,
go to the home page
at CMU, or download
the code for yourself. It should build out-of-box on several platforms,
linux,
freebsd, sun4m, etc. - but work is still needed. Help with documentation would
be greatly appreciated, too. It's important that people grab this stuff ASAP,
too, just in case some people decide to go after it for potential patent
violations (we all know how much people love the patent system)."
Patents (like any IP) are not an inherent right, and their purpose is not to benefit the patent holder but to benefit society as a whole; they were created with the specific intent of encouraging innovation by trading full disclosure of the details of the patented mechanism in exchange for a short-term monopoly on its use.
They were created (in their modern form) to prevent excessive secrecy and completely snuff out the stifling guild model of protecting trade secrets.
Mathematics and facts of the natural sciences are specifically noted as unpatentable in patent law. This is because it was recognized that there was no need for patents in these fields; people already shared their discoveries freely in hopes of the recognition and prestige they could gain by it. Patents would only interfere with this and slow progress.
Computer science is not only a branch of mathematics (algorithms are as old as the abacus, and were formalized long before the first programmable computer), but shows all the same behavior that makes it an unsuitable field for patents. People proudly explain their clever algorithms and data structures for no direct monetary gain. Allowing software patents has only interfered with the progress of the field.
Practically every software developer breaks software patent laws. There are a great many software patents on simple, obvious, and common practices, and it is generally not feasible even to check whether you are infringing on anyone else's patents. It is also not economically feasible to legally challenge every bogus patent that one wishes to use. If one were to attempt to remain in full compliance at all times with patent law, it would be hundreds or thousands of times more expensive than the actual software development.
Not only are software patents useless and harmful, they are impossible to obey or generally enforce, thus becoming merely another weapon for competition through litigation so whoever spends the most money on lawyers wins.
We don't believe there are any intellectual property issues with CMU Sphinx. Any patents issues that people might raise would have to overcome the considerable prior art at CMU, and all the code is from CMU, so there are no copyright issues.
After years of public moneys going towards this project, we feel good about putting the code in a public place like sourceforge. It makes a public record of it, and we hope this will help the community to build new systems and applications, and to refine the code. We intend to release the acoustic trainer and Sphinx3 also. Sphinx2 is our real-time system (but S3 is getting there quickly).
We will also be releasing the trainer, and Sphinx 3, but it's coming out in steps. Sphinx 2 is the real-time engine, and while Sphinx 3 is more accurate, it's still slower.
As far as releasing Data, we will be releasing whatever we can. It's OK for us to release models derived from data from, for instance, the LDC (linguistic data consortium), because their licensing terms explicitly allow it, but much of our data comes from other sources. We'll be able to put some data out, but i think we'd be better off creating a public repository of contributed data, explicitly stating that all contributed data will remain free.