Chapter 1

License and use of Sphinx,

SphinxTrain and CMU LM
Toolkit

• Sphinx and SphinxTrain is developed by researchers and developers of

CMU.

• CMU-Cambridge LM Toolkit is co-developed by researchers in CMU and

Cambridege University.

If you are interested in Sphinx, your right on the code and binaries in Sphinx,
SphinxTrain and CMU LM Toolkit must be your major concern. Here is some-
thing you may want to know,

1. Copying of Sphinx, SphinxTrain The code and binary of Sphinx are

free for commercial/non-commercial user with or without modification.

2. Copying of CMU LM Toolkit The code of CMU LM toolkit is made

available research purposes only. It may be redistributed freely for this
purpose.

3. Academic license We are not using GPL-ed license. Hence, you are not
obliged to distribute your source code.

4. Warranty Although the code of Sphinx and SphinxTrain is free and CMU
LM toolkit for research purpose. We do not provide any warranty and
support at all. However, the maintainers of Sphinx are always willing
to discuss and help developers to build applications using Sphinx. As at

2
 September 27, 2004, the maintainer is Arthur Chan , you are welcomed to
talk to him.

Section 1.1 attached the legal statement of the software.

1.1 Licence Agreement of Sphinx and Sphinx-

Train
==============================================
Copyright (c) 1995-2004 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modifi-
cation, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistribution of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or
other materials provided with the distribution.
This work was supported in part by funding from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation of the United
States of America, and the CMU Sphinx Speech Consortium.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVER-
SITY “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, IN-
CLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
NOR ITS EMPLOYEES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, IN-
CIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE
GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIA-
BILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (IN-
CLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT
OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSI-
BILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
==============================================

3
1.2 Licence Agreement of CMU LM Toolkit
==============================================
Copyright (C) 1996, Carnegie Mellon University, Cambridge University, Ronald
Rosenfeld and Philip Clarkson.
All rights reserved.
This software is made available for research purposes only. It may be re-
distributed freely for this purpose, in full or in part, provided that this entire
copyright notice is included on any copies of this software and applications and
derivations thereof.
This software is provided on an ”as is” basis, without warranty of any kind,
either expressed or implied, as to any matter including, but not limited to war-
ranty of fitness of purpose, or merchantability, or results obtained from use of
this software.
==============================================

1.3 About this document

We hope that this document itself can be distributed such that its quality can
be improved. Hence, the follwing permission is granted to the users,

• Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual

provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on
all copies.

• Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this man-

ual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire
resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission no-
tice identical to this one.

• Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual

into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions,
except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved
by the Carnegie Mellon Unversity.

1.4 How to contribute?

Sphinx is a software written for all researchers and developers of the world. We
chose to use the X11 style’s license because this will allow users to have higher
flexibility in incorporation of the code.

4
 To trully achieve this goal, your participation is necessary. Due the limitation
of resources, sphinx’s performance still has gap with state-of-the-art system.
Your participation is necessary to refine and perfect this software. We would
also like to collect models for different languages and in different conditions.
This will allow users/developers in the world can develop speech recognition
software easily.
The software is still under heavy development, to know which part of the
software requires change. You are welcomed to Arthur Chan’s web page
www.cs.cmu.edu/ archan/
to see what are the open projects of Sphinx.
As this document is compiled at (September 27, 2004) , please contact Arthur
Chan, Evandro Gouvea and Alan Black if you are interested to contribute to the
speech recognition.