A comment on Slashdot that concerns me

[Victor Tsaran]

HI, Mat!
I cannot hold my anger inside. You haven't done anything wrong and, vice
versa, we all are grateful to you for your gracious offer. Even though I
myself gave up on UMSDOS-based Linux, due to the inferiority of UMSDOS file
system, I very much value and praise people who put their own time in order to
make life easier for others.
I think we should post our strong oposition to what this guy said. He
mentioned something about Aple. Everyone knows that Aple has done nothing to
make their operating system accessible to the blind.
Terrible to know that such people, like the author of that message, exist.
WHere was this posted?

Regards,
Victor

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Campbell" <mattcamp at crosswinds.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2000 1:48 PM
Subject: A comment on Slashdot that concerns me


| Here is one comment that was posted on Slashdot regarding ZipSpeak and
| probably Speakup in general:
|
| (begin quote)
|
|    This is nothing but a threat to independent producers, and
|    "slashdot"'s unquestioning boosting of a LinusX technology in this
|    specialised and delicate market is inappropriate. Although the goal of
|    having universal access to LinusX is laudable, that is not what this
|    product offers. Rather, it offers access for the blind so long as they
|    buy a speech synthesiser which is on the approved list. Those of us
|    who make speech syntehsisers which didn't make it onto this hallowed
|    team end up losing a whole chunk of our market because, even though
|    our synthesisers offer a lot of important functionality for the blind
|    ("easy listening" modulated voices, automatic timbre management,
|    etc.), we didn't promote our product at the right time to the right
|    developer.
|
|    This product is particularly cruel as it locks in people forever to an
|    inferior technology, by exploting the fact that they need speech
|    synthesis if they are to run Linux at all. Zipspeak should be forced
|    to provide support for all speech synthesiser by writing the
|    appropriate drivers, and should forfeit their FDA approval and the
|    tax-deductibility of their product if they continue to tilt the
|    playing field for synthesisers. It is wholly irresponsible of them to
|    come into an orderly marketplace and shake things up like this. We
|    never had these problems with Apple (a company which, IMO, really
|    "gets it" with regard to open standards) and only a few with
|    Microsoft. What a shame that the so-called "altruists" of the LinusX
|    community couldn't be a bit more understanding.
|
|    Stephen Mundy
|
|    --Murrinco
|
| (end quote)
|
| What have we done wrong?  Or what have I done wrong?  Should I have
| delayed my release of ZipSpeak until there were drivers for all known
| synthesizers?  Or should I have spent my spring break writing
| synthesizer drivers?  I probably couldn't anyway, because I know
| little about kernel programming and don't have any documentation for
| synthesizers other than the DoubleTalk (though I could have learned
| some from Emacspeak driver code).  Perhaps I should release an updated
| ZipSpeak with the new drivers which are on the Speakup FTP site, even
| though they're not yet in the official Speakup release.  But I figured
| that since they're not in the official Speakup release, they probably
| aren't ready for general use yet.
|
| I really didn't mean any harm to the makers of unsupported speech
| synthesizers, but I guess this person doesn't think so.  What do you
| all think?
|
| --
| Matt Campbell <mattcamp at crosswinds.net>
| Web site:  http://www.crosswinds.net/~mattcamp/
| ICQ #:  33005941
|
|
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