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Re: [orca-list] OpenTTS 0.1 released.

Hello,
Halim I think you sum things up quite well, if something still leaves things to be desired (eg. stability) then if those in control of the project don't provide the improvements desired then others will try and do what they can to improve it. Unfortunately if the original author and those prepared to do the work can't come to an agreement on working together there is few other options than for them to go their own way.
I'm not intending to point fingers as I haven't been involved in the discussions between opentts developers and Braillecom, the following is how its appearing to an outsider.
Braillecom developed speech-dispatcher but after speech-dispatcher 0.6.7 development slowed right down and there was little obvious sign of when development would proceed. For one reason or another Luke and others felt they couldn't get the changes into Braillecom's speech-dispatcher and so the only option left was to take advantage of the license terms permitting a fork and the creation of a new project. Fairly soon after this out of the blue (at least that's how it seems to me) Braillecom announces testing for speech-dispatcher 0.7. Skeptical people may see this speech-dispatcher 0.7 announcement to be a last cry from Braillecom trying to attract people/user/developers, but whether this cry is too late only time will tell.
So from what I have seen from Braillecom they wish to keep control on the project, manage what goes in and out of the code, etc, etc. However if they haven't got the resources to keep development going (resources have been cited for the lack of releases recently) then either they must accept people will fork if they won't hand over a bit of control. If they didn't want to see forking then did they choose the right licensing terms, may be not. Your license choice permitted forking so accept it has now happened.
This very much reflects what I saw with python and setup-tools and distribute. Talking for myself, the bickering which is going on between Braillecom and opentts developers only will damage both (in short with setuptools and distribute I distanced myself from both). 

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Halim Sahin wrote:

Hi,
Unfortunately speechd0.6.7 wasn't stable engough for serious daily work.

None of the available udiosystems were stable (see alsa bugs, pulseaudio
performance issues, audiodropouts in oss driver...)
With our libao driver and the adaptation to pulseadio we got a stable
usable audio support in speechd.


I agree that the fragmentation in a11y projects isn't fine but please
don't forget that brailcom didn't support speech-dispatcher last months.
You have resumed the work after opentts was started.
You call it minor improvments, I want to say fixing lots of mem leaks
should be done in every project so far.

Brailcom didn't offer a perspective when we asked this last year.
You answer was
sent patches we will try to review these but don't know if this happens
this or next year :-(.
Due to stability problems in speechd 0.6.7 this wasn't acceptable.
I like the idea to merge the projects but brailcom should work together
with the other devs and don't let patches wait for a long time.
I don't like the fact that in orca and other screenreaders we have now
several almost the same speech system.
These drivers must be maintained seperately and gives no improovement at
all.

I like speech-dispatcher and i know the importance of your work.

@all:
try to merge both projects!
BR.
halim

On Mo, Jun 07, 2010 at 05:34:47 +0200, Hynek Hanke wrote:

On 6.6.2010 05:09, Luke Yelavich wrote:

I am proud to announce the very first release of OpenTTS, version 0.1.

Dear Luke Yelavich,

It is a pure nonsense that the development of OpenTTS
started two months ago. You know very well that it is a fork
of the Speech Dispatcher project which has been developed
in the course of the past 10 years. The real developers are
different from who you wrote in your announce.

The project was not started to become a replacement for
gnome-speech, as you state, instead being a generic speech
service available to different client applications, Gnome and Orca
being one of them. The decision of Orca to migrate to Speech
Dispatcher has been made over the past year and was announced
before OpenTTS was ``created'', as is described on Bugzilla:
     https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606975

Please let us remind you that the architecture and design are
what is most important. It took us time and resources to come
up with the current architecture and we don't think OpenTTS is
introducing anything significantly new over Speech Dispatcher.
Although some work has been done in the fork, in the big picture,
these have been so far just minor code improvements.

Before the fork, there was a face-to-face agreement between
you and Brailcom, that you will keep an unofficial development
repository, where we will gather patches and changes, which will
later be reviewed and released in the official version. While we were
doing so, we evaluated the quality of the patches gathered in this way
and found it was very various. There were good code improvements,
but they were mixed with very amateurish hacks (such as totally random
port assignment or completely missing documentation), which we could
not release as serious software without first finding time to rework
them significantly, which takes resources and time.

The whole fork is an unnecessary fragmentation of the limited
resources we all have for accessibility. If there was capacity
to move Speech Dispatcher forward, it could have been done in
the same project.

We still continue the development of Speech Dispatcher from our
own resources for the benefit of all of you, in our own serious
and systematic way, and preparing the 0.7 release. It is however
impossible now for us to use fixes and improvements from the OpenTTS Git
due to reorganization of its code and especially the unnecessary
renaming of all identifiers in the code.

As the real developers of Speech Dispatcher, which some of you now
call OpenTTS, we must say that a lot of work is currently being wasted.
We continue to see this as very bad.

The new name OpenTTS is very unfortunate, because it is technically
wrong. Speech Dispatcher/OpenTTS doesn't do and shouldn't do any TTS
(Text-to-Speech). It is merely an interface between applications and
Text-to-Speech engines. Serious developers must understand and use
terminology correctly.

We still don't see a technical reason for such duplication of effort.
We asked for responsibility and cooperation several times publicly and
also privately without any effect. We are a non profit organization
and our main goal is to help visually impaired people. All our
projects are strictly Free Software projects and Speech Dispatcher is
one of our key long term projects for the last 10 years. We believe
that it is a major benefit for every project to be backed up by a stable
company which provides quality controll and stability of the future
development. We don't understand the motivations behind rebranding
Speech Dispatcher to OpenTTS.

We believe that a constructive solution is still possible. Our offer
of cooperation is still valid, nothing has changed. There are two
possibilities for cooperation: as a volunteer contributor and in the
future as a paid member of our development team. Anyone who wishes to
cooperate, please contact us, we are very open.

Best regards,
Hynek Hanke
Speech Dispatcher maintainer
Brailcom, o.p.s.

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