Licensing & Distribution of Applications and

Resources

Ruvan Weerasinghe

University of Colombo School of Computing

Vientiane, Lao PDR – Jan 2009

Phase I Experiences

• Applications

– TTS, OCR

• Resources

– Corpus, Lexicon

• Licensing

– Involves both apps & resources

• Distribution

– Chiefly involves apps

– But also Corpus

Phase I Scenario

• Licensing

– Ownership with IDRC

– Partners free to have unlimited copies

• Distribution

– No real plan except to testers!

– In the case of TTS, only to Blind

– Biggest issue inability to release corpus

Phase I Outcome

• TTS System

– Used by blind community, free

• OCR System

– Only used internally (not in production environment)

• Sinhala Corpus

– Unable to distribute

• Sinhala Lexicon

– So far only for internal processing

Phase I Outcome (contd.)

• Sinhala Corpus and Lexicon requested by Commercial entities

– Considered (only) derivative works as distributable (pre-CC) e.g. words

– Only derivatives that did not serve the same purpose as original

– Sold words/freqs to vendor

– Receipts ploughed back into Lab (apart from minor payments to staff)

Phase II Scenario

• Country partner(s) ownership (even for commercial purposes)

– IDRC to have unlimited numbers of free copies

– Better regime for promotion and sustainability

• Apps: TM tool, Handwriting recognition

• Resources: Language Teacher, Training Material for content creation

Phase II Scenario

• Country partner(s) ownership (even for commercial purposes)

– IDRC to have unlimited numbers of free copies

– Better regime for promotion and sustainability

• Apps: TM tool, Handwriting recognition

• Resources: Language Teacher, Training Material for content creation

Phase II Scenario (contd.)

• Main aim remains education & awareness of Local Language use

– As widely as possible

– Hence free or for nominal fee

– Vendors to charge (how to control?)

• However, commercial viability is not sacrilege!

– It would ensure sustainability

– Intend to pursue means for this

Other Initiatives

• EnSiTip: GPL'd and freely distributed

– Significant user community

• MS Speller: 'Work for hire'

– No other model (also in case of Nuance – a mobile company)

• Speech Recognizer: Shared IPR

– Retain ownership of corpus

– Unlimited free copies to partner?

– Be paid royalty on sales