700 bps Speech Vocoder

On Monday, September 28, 2015 at 1:46:16 PM UTC-4, coupay...@gmail.com wrote:
> One of the problems with Speech Vocoders, is that it heavily infested with lawyers. MELP was used early on for some radio projects and the lawyers came out like a swarm of yellow jackets.
> 
> The original author (he's not responsible for my antics with the code here), made a personal decision to go with Open Source, Open Hardware. He sells a low bit-rate Digital Voice modem for radio that is open to the public to do with as they see fit.
> 
> Burn your own PC boards, create your own alternative designs with it, etc.
> 
> The motto being: "We own the Stack"
> 
> Can't get that with patented, proprietary code.
> 
> Obviously this is not very interesting to people who just want to buy a chip for $10 and solder it in. It's a different tribe. Sort of like a bunch of hippies, only they are still contributing to society :-)

Lawyers are because of patents, and patents are because companies and individuals want to get paid for their R&D...

But patents expire in 20 years

The original MELP patent was filed in 1994 so it must be expired by now

http://www.google.com/patents/US5699477

And no, hippies are not contributing much to society, but patent holders do