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phonon-40m-de

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Gradium 163

Hi Gradium team,

Congratulations on the Phonon release — the on-device footprint and streaming quality are impressive, and we'd love to build on it.

Who we are: We're the MUCGPT team at it@M (Munich's municipal IT services provider). MUCGPT is the City of Munich's free, open-source AI assistant for public sector employees.

What we'd like to do: Integrate Phonon 40m (German) as an optional, fully on-device text-to-speech feature so that AI answers in MUCGPT can be read aloud — improving accessibility, especially for visually impaired users, without any cloud round-trip.

Why German, why Apache: Our whole stack is MIT-licensed, and our speech-input pipeline already uses local, permissively licensed models. To keep MUCGPT fully open-source and redistributable by other municipalities, we can only bundle Apache/MIT-licensed components — so phonon-31m-en works license-wise, but German is the language our users actually need, and 31m doesn't cover it.

Our questions:

1. Is the CC BY-NC licensing of the phonon-40m models driven by training-data constraints, or is it a deliberate commercial-tier split?
2. Would you consider granting a fair-use exception for public-sector use — for example, a license variant that allows municipal administrations and other public institutions to use and redistribute phonon-40m-de with open-source projects like MUCGPT?

An important detail in our case: as a public institution we are not legally non-profit — we're a commercial entity in the legal sense, which means CC BY-NC 4.0 excludes us entirely, despite our use being strictly in the public interest, free of charge for employees, and with no monetization. That's the gap we're stuck in: technically ideal, publicly beneficial, but license-blocked. Happy to be a showcase use case for you.