Re: [orca-list] Fwd: Help ask Microsoft to make elequence open source.

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

And therein lies every single problem imaginable. The speech synthesizer 
seems to go by many names and appears to be under the control of more 
than one company, although none of them are Microsoft. Microsoft 
controls speech synthesizer voices such as Mary, Mike, Sam, David, etc. 
I do know that IBM had a license to generate the speech in question, but 
they called it ViaVoice, Outloud and IBMTTS. It is unclear though 
whether they even had source code that they could have opened up even if 
they wanted to. I am only aware of an SDK they had and a very badly 
behaving binary that they said was some kind of beta which crashed 
extremely often, and eventually stopped working altogether. Several 
other commercial entities had SDK's and such under various other names, 
but I am aware of no one who ever was either allowed to obtain or even 
owned copyright to the source code. Clearly Microsoft can do nothing to 
liberate the code, as it is not Microsoft's speech synthesis engine, and 
never was. If source code is indeed available somewhere, it could be an 
interesting academic project maybe, though there are better alternatives 
that are already open source. Unfortunately for this one, I have 
believed the source code to be lost for many years now. There is little 
to no chance of it becoming open source because there is little to no 
chance of finding the code. It's pretty easy to see that the actual 
owner of the code is unknown. Why else would the petition be written to 
Microsoft, who most certainly doesn't have it, nor would they know where 
to find it?

Sent from the moon