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Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

GPL :( can't use it

Why not? Contact the author(s) and ask if they'll give you non-GPL license.

The whole project is based on various libraries. In particular, the POS tagger itself uses the OWLQN optimizer from Stanford NLP (licensed under GPL).

However, it's possible to remove GPL libraries out of the POS tagger as mentioned here: https://github.com/brendano/ark-tweet-nlp/blob/master/LICENS...

You may want to look at Factorie (https://github.com/factorie/factorie), that has a decent POS tagger and it's not crippled by the license. It also has dependency parsing which works reasonably well.

I've been looking at Factorie for a while but haven't actually done anything heavy with it.

I planned to replace the optimizer in CMU's POS tagger with the one implemented in OpenNLP to make the tagger fully Apache. Unfortunately, so busy right now. Currently, I'm running the tagger on AWS, so the GPL doesn't hurt me much.

BTW, besides the POS tagger, CMU's TweeboParser depends on Turbo Parser which again is licensed under GPL.

it's not as simple as that, the whole stack is GPL, mainly due to Standford's usage of GPL for all of their NLP.

GPL is a killer for any project that's not a toy or for school.

It depends how the project ownership and copyright is structures. We have used GPL projects successfully when they are dual licensed. It never hurts to ask anyway.

GPL is a killer for any project that's not a toy or for school.

My paycheck - financed by some of the largest companies in my country - disagrees. There are other ways to make money besides locking others from your code.

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