Creating Speakup for FreeBSD

[Tony Baechler]

Hello all,

I'm aware that this is not directly related to the Linux Speakup 
project, but I thought some developers here might be interested.

The FreeBSD Foundation has allocated $80,000 USD for proposals related 
to development work related to any subsystem or infrastructure of the 
FreeBSD operating system.  Since a developer would actually be paid for 
such work assuming their proposal is accepted, I thought some here might 
want to take on the challenge.  Payment would be made when major 
milestones are reached and when the project is completed.  I myself am 
not a developer.  While FreeBSD is accessible with ssh and perhaps a 
serial console, there is no support for hearing boot messages as you get 
with Speakup for Linux.  I would personally like to see a set of FreeBSD 
kernel patches which offer similar functionality to the Linux kernel 
patches which form Speakup.  I know that it would be impossible to port 
the source directly to FreeBSD, but I would think that some of the 
driver code could be reused since a synthesizer would act the same 
regardless of the OS.

There is a pdf document which contains the proposal form and guidelines.  
I can attach it for those who are interested or you might be able to get 
it from the web site.  http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/  Write off list 
if you want me to send it to you.  I can also send a plain text version 
if you don't want to deal with the pdf format.  I really hope that a 
developer pursues this as I would like to see the blind have access to 
as many free operating systems as possible.  Incidentally, I think Gnome 
and Orca are already part of the FreeBSd ports collection, so a version 
of Speakup would provide another complete free alternative to Windows.  
For the short time that I ran FreeBSD, I thought it performed better in 
some ways than Linux, especially on a server.