Re: ubuntu and software synthesiser

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Henrik:

> Is there a way we can make this more user friendly? Are there licensing 
> reasons why gnome-speech is compiled without DECtalk support or 
> technical ones? If it's a question of some compile flags then I can ask 
> our packagers to make a DECtalk-enabled version available.

The issue is licensing.  The problem is that the DECtalk header files
are Fonix's intellectual property.  As a result, one needs to have the
DECtalk SDK installed on their machine to build the DECtalk driver (the
gnome-speech build will automatically build the DECtalk driver if it
finds the DECtalk SDK).

If the Ubuntu distribution folks were able to get the DECtalk SDK on
their production machines, then I think they'd be able to ship the
gnome-speech driver for DECtalk and then direct users to the Fonix web
site to purchase the DECtalk run time (one would need to check the
DECtalk license to make sure it is OK to ship things built against the
SDK -- I'm not a lawyer and I'm not qualified to interpret legal
documents).

An alternative here would be to obtain a suitable license from Fonix to
check their DECtalk header files into the gnome-speech repository.  If
that were possible, one could potentially write a stub library for the
DECtalk API, allowing the gnome-speech driver for DECtalk to be built
without requiring the SDK to be installed.  I've ventured a little bit
into this space with Fonix, but I'm spending the majority of my time
focusing on Orca proper.

Will