A comment on Slashdot that concerns me

[Dave Talmage]

Hi All,

The level of ignorance of Stephen Munde, whoever he may be, is amazing.  You
rarely get the opportunity to see self serving stupidity at such an
advanced stage.  I'm sure our best interest is utmost in his mind.
The undertone of Stephen's message is diametrically opposed to the stated
one.  He is basically saying all or nothing, but what he actually means is
how dare you provide a product for free that may take part of my market
share.
Mr. Munde must also either think there aren't many around still, or that we
have short memories, regarding the supposed good days when Apple ruled the
market for blind computer users.  I still cringe thinking about all the hoops
I used to jump through trying to get applications to talk with my Apple IIe,
as well as the applications I never was able to get talking.  I also remember
getting a RC Systems Slotbuster card just so I could have access to
AppleWorks.
As for the all or nothing aspect, I personally don't know of any software
that works with every synthesizer, braille display, and magnifier.  It's
funny, but I always thought that software manufacturers developed support for
the most popular first and then added to their list as time went on.  I maybe
mistaken, but I thought it had something to do with selling more copies to an
established user base.  I'm sure that Apple and Microsoft have their entirely
comprehensive list of hardware and check it twice, like Santa Claus, to make
sure they don't forget anybody.  Why also, did he single out zipspeak anyway?
As for the orderly market, what planet are they from?  Mr. Munde's statement
outwardly appears to be an excellent example of why the Free Software
Foundation was founded and why Linux has become so popular, but his views
don't support the concept of a free market ecconmy and competition either.
The part about being locked in forever to inferior technology is laughable. 
Don't I wish I could have bought 1 synthesizer back when I started using
computers and have been done with it.  I haven't actually counted lately, but
I must be on my 7th or 8th synthesizer by now, to say nothing of computers. 
By the way, who is the judge of inferior verses advanced technology anyhow?
As for the FDA approval, what the he!! is he talking about?  Tax
deductibility for zipspeak???  It's free Mr. Munde, that's why they call it
free software.
Regarding forcing zipspeak to support all available hardware, I firmly
believe this as well, provided that someone provide a staff of 100 with
annual salaries between $50,000 and $75,000.  Maybe a consortium of hardware
manufacturers should be forced by Mr. Munde's FDA to foot the bill.  Where do
I sign up for one of the positions?
In case you can't tell by the tone of my message, this ticked me off just a
bit.
In closing, I'd like to say thanks to Matt, as well as the folks at Speakup. 
I've just taken a quick look at zipslack so far, but I'm impressed, and
apparently you have at least one person worried.  I was impressed enough with
both the Slackware distribution of Linux, and Speakup as well, that I've been
downloading a copy of slackware in the background all day in order to replace
my old Redhat 5.2 with its 2.0.36 kernel.  Let me assure you, downloading a
635MB iso96 image over a 56K modem is not a quick operation.

Dave


At 12:48 PM 3/24/00 -0600, you wrote:
>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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>
>