A comment on Slashdot that concerns me

[Brian Borowski]

Hey: I don't think I'd worry about this complaint too much.  There's
nothing wrong with linux and speech, as this person seems to imply, and if
companies have synthesizers they want to have drivers for, either they
right them, or send what's needed to those who are capable of writing
them, (that's you Kirk).

The whole thing will get more robust and easier to use with more
flexibility as time goes on; it wasn't too long ago that it could only
work with DoubleTalk, so keep up the work with those distributions Mat and
the others.

Brian Borowski



On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Matthew Campbell 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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