[dspillett]

> IANAL, but AFAICS this leaves 2 options, switching the license or removing that dependency.

There is a third option: asking the project for an exception.

Though that is unlikely to be granted¹ leaving you back with just the other two options.

And of course a forth choice: just ignore the license. This is the option taken by companies like Onyx, whose products I might otherwise be interested in…

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[1] Those of us who pick GPL3 or AGPL generally do so to keep things definite and an exception would muddy the waters, also it might not even be possible if the project has many maintainers as relicensing would require agreement from all who have provided code that is in the current release. Furthermore, if it has inherited the license from one of its dependencies, an exception is even less practical.

[woadwarrior01]

> There is a third option: asking the project for an exception.

IIUC, the project isn't at the liberty to grant such an exception because it inherits its GPL license from espeak-ng.

[dspillett]

Ah, yes, good catch, I didn't look deeper into the dependency tree at all. I'll update my footnote to include that as one of the reasons an exception may be impossible (or at least highly impractical).

[wongarsu]

A fourth option would be a kind of dual-licensing: the project as-is is available under GPL-3.0, but the source code in this repository excluding any dependencies is also available under Apache 2.0

Any user would still effectively be bound by the GPL-3.0, but if someone can remove the GPL dependencies they could use the project under Apache

[dspillett]

That is an option for the publisher of the library, not the consumer of it. If it isn't already done then asking for it to be done is the same as asking for an exception otherwise (option three).

[wongarsu]

The use of the library is four lines. Three set up the library (`phonemizer.backend.EspeakBackend(language="en-us", preserve_punctuation=True, with_stress=True)`), the other calls it (`phonemes_list = self.phonemizer.phonemize([text])`). Plus I guess the import statements. Even ignoring Google vs Oracle I don't think those lines by themselves meet any threshold of originality.

Obviously you can't run them (with the original library) without complying with the GPL. But I don't see why I couldn't independently of that also give you this text file under Apache 2.0 to do with as you want (which for the record still doesn't allow you to run them with the original library without complying with the GPL, but that'd be phoneme forcing you to do that, not this project)

You would have to be very specific about the dual-licensing to avoid confusion about what you are allowed to do under Apache conditions though. You can't just say "it's dual-licensed"

[joshuaissac]

You could even extract out the parts that do not call the GPL library into an upstream project under the Apache 2.0 licence, and pull in both that and the GPL library in the downstream project, relying on Apache 2.0 -> GPL 3.0 compatibility instead of explicit dual licensing to allow the combined work to be distributed under GPLv3.