Announcing the OpenTTS project, a fork of speech-dispatcher

[A]

Who's project lead or is there a committee? Sorry but it is not
obvious from the announcement who's having the final word on
decisions.

Thanks.

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 4:07 AM, Luke Yelavich <themuso at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I am writing to announce a fork of speech-dispatcher, the open source 
> text-to-speech framework, initially developed by Brailcom as a part of the 
> freebsoft project, http://www.freebsoft.org. The fork also includes other 
> important components of the speech stack, including speechd-up, the connector 
> between speakup and speech-dispatcher, and the speech-dispatcher java 
> bindings. As you may have guessed from the subject, the fork is now called 
> OpenTTS. OpenTTS refers to both the speech server, API and documentation, as 
> well as the umbrella project as a whole. The other projects mentioned above 
> have also been given new names, speechd-up is now known as OSpeakup, and 
> speechd-java is now known as OpenTTS-java.
>
> Why Fork Speech Dispatcher and Related Projects?
>
> One of the fundamental freedoms granted by the GPL is the freedom to publish 
> one's modifications to the source code of a software product. ?Sometimes, 
> such publication takes the form of a fork, in which the modified product is 
> developed separately from the original. In this case, we've chosen to make 
> forks of software initially produced by the Brailcom group. We'll describe 
> our reasons for doing that below.
>
> The Brailcom group had a great idea. ?They wanted to provide a system or 
> user-level service to control synthetic speech. ?That was Speech Dispatcher. 
> They created libraries to ease the task of communicating with that service, 
> so that it would be possible for programmers to speech-enable their 
> applications , simply by calling output functions provided by one of these 
> libraries. ?For several years, Brailcom actively maintained and promoted 
> Speech Dispatcher and the software associated with it. They innovated, and 
> the community at large was slow to adopt.
>
> Over time, projects within the accessibility community began to embrace 
> Speech Dispatcher. ?It is now the preferred speech synthesis backend of the 
> Orca screenreader. The Speakup screenreader can control many software-based 
> text-to-speech engines with the help of Speech Dispatcher and a small 
> connector program. One advantage of that strategy is that Orca and Speakup 
> can cooperatively use the same text-to-speech engine. ?The key point is that 
> many projects have adopted Speech Dispatcher, to a greater or lesser extent.
>
> As time passed, the tables turned. The most recent official release of Speech 
> Dispatcher was made in the summer of 2008. ?The developers began taking less 
> and less of a role in the project. ?The source code moved from a CVS 
> repository to git in 2009. ?During much of that year, active development took 
> place in a repository hosted by Luke Yelavich. ?Mr. Yelavich even produced 
> several unofficial "release candidate" versions of Speech Dispatcher. 
> Unfortunately, the official release process is stalled. In an effort to 
> clarify the current status of the software, members of the community 
> contacted Brailcom. Replies to these requests for information were somewhat 
> non-committal. ?In effect, Brailcom stated that they were interested in 
> developing Speech Dispatcher, but they had no current plans.
>
> That, in short, is why we forked. ?Members of the open-source accessibility 
> community need and want an actively-developed speech framework. The OpenTTS 
> project hopes to fulfill that need by carrying forward the vision set forth 
> by Brailcom.
>
> The OpenTTS.org website is now live, although there is not much there at the 
> moment. The site will be expanded in the near future to add areas for 
> documentation, and feature specification tracking, to help developers better 
> outline and indicate what the next release of OpenTTS will contain. You will 
> also find a link to our mailing lists, where you can discuss OpenTTS 
> development.
>
> We welcome all contributors from the community who wish to help us further 
> develope the OpenTTS framework, and encourage any interested contributors to 
> join the opentts-dev mailing list. To get more information on this list, or 
> other lists relating to OpenTTS, please go to http://lists.opentts.org. We 
> also especially welcome any Brailcom staff who wish to contribute to the 
> project.
>
> I plan to announce the focus for OpenTTS development over the next 6 months 
> very soon, and will do so on the opentts-dev mailing list (see above), and 
> the website, so please stay tuned for more information. Should you have any 
> questions, please feel free to subscribe to the opentts-users mailing list, 
> and ask away. Commonly asked questions will be put up on the website for all 
> to read.
>
> Finally, I'd like to thank Chris Brannon and William Hubbs for their hard 
> work so far in helping get things off the ground, particularly with code 
> cleanup and re-organisation. I would also like to thank all of those in the 
> community who supported going ahead with the fork, you know who you are.
>
> I sincerely hope that from here on out, we can create a text to speech 
> framework that can rival those available for proprietary operating systems, 
> as well as creating a framework that all application developers feel 
> comfortable working with. Text to speech is important for more than just 
> those with a disability, it is very useful for many other people for many 
> different tasks. Lets give them a reason to want to use it.
>
>
> Luke Yelavich
> OpenTTS project lead.
>
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>