Announcing the OpenTTS project, a fork of speech-dispatcher

[William Hubbs]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 04:18:08PM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Bill Cox, le Mon 19 Apr 2010 09:50:51 -0400, a ?crit :
> > > Brailcom has always officially supported the work done by Luke Yelavich and others. ?We
> > > linked Luke's git from the official Speech Dispatcher web page and we were trying to
> > > promote this work where possible. ?We also put at least some minimal effort into
> > > reviewing how the development continues and plan to make an official release
> 
> Couldn't brailcom just share the responsibility of releases with Luke
> & co?  I believe forking was for a big part needed to actually commit
> and release new versions.  Projects that I have seen forked were usually
> like that: the maintainers not having the time to develop and release
> new versions, and not having other people do it either.
 
From my personal point of view, Samuel is correct.

There has, in my personal opinion, been very poor collaberation between
the accessibility community and Brailcom.

One example, in my opinion, of poor collaberation has been Brailcom's
extremely minimal involvement in the development process.  A development
repository was opened by Luke so that some of us would be able to get
changes into speech-dispatcher.  Many patches were sent to this list,
for a long time, but there has been extremely minimal participation from
Brailcom, so the official repository was never updated and Brailcom
hasn't been responding to our patches.

We repeatedly asked Brailcom for direction on this list and were told
that they couldn't commit any resources to speech-dispatcher at this
time.  So, speech-dispatcher was becoming a more important project to
the accessibility community, but the maintainers were not working on it,
and they had no idea when they would be able to work on it again.

Another concern I personally have is Brailcom's speechd-up project being
deprecated as well as their comments on their speechd-up project page
about speakup itself being replaced by other technologies.  On the
contrary, speakup has a very active user base and shows no signs of
being replaced.

In my opinion, the fork happened because of poor collaberation and slow
responsiveness from the maintainers.

I understand that what Brailcom spends their time on is controled by
funding, but they made no effort or very minimal effort to work with the
community.

Yes, we could continue doing unofficial releases and waiting for them to
do official releases when they get funding, etc, but the problem there
is that if we add functionality in the community releases, there is no
guarantee that that functionality would be accepted by Brailcom in their
official releases.

I personally would be open to working on speech dispatcher, but there
would need to be a big change in the way Brailcom collaberates with the
community for me to be comfortable with that.

William