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.
