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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [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 _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
