A comment on Slashdot that concerns me

[Ron Kassen]

Seems to me that this person needs to be patient and remember that this is a
developing market.  Maybe I am not angry because I have a supported
synthesizer, but if they are really interested in their speech synthesizer
working with Linux, then maybe they should learn the code and write the
drive - maybe get involved with the group of people making this happen.  I
encourage your work, keep it up, I know that eventually there will be more
supported synthesizers.  There will be people who pitch in and come up with
ideas/ways of writing drivers for unsupported synthesizers.  I have to go
back to the dos days, when there were very few synthesizers support by some
programs.  It just took some time for the list of supported synthesizers to
develop.  The "hallowed list", as this writer puts it, are probably the most
commonly used synthesizers on the market.  This is not a bad thing.

RK

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-admin at braille.uwo.ca
[mailto:speakup-admin at braille.uwo.ca]On Behalf Of Matthew Campbell
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2000 12:49 PM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
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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