Re: [orca-list] espeak-extra-voices

[Jonathan Duddington <jonsd users sf net>]

On 16 May, Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com> wrote:

> Because eSpeak itself is GPLv3, I would assume that voice files are
> also covered under GPLV3.

The voice files are scripts which are interpreted by eSpeak at runtime.

If you make a new voice file, its licence (if any) is not determined by
the licence of the eSpeak program.

If your new voice is derived from voice files in the eSpeak
distribution, then in theory it should respect the licence of the
original voice files.  But voice files are trivial.  The contents of
the language voice files are determined by their function and are
therefore not copyrightable.  Even the choices of pitch and formant
values in the voice variant files may not be, although I'm not sure
about the legal position on that.

A better solution would be for Orca to allow the user to specify both a
language voice and a voice variant, which is what the NVDA
screen-reader does.