[orca-list] Announcing the OpenTTS project, a fork of speech-dispatcher

[Bill Cox]

Luke is project lead, though I believe a couple of others may also
have authority to commit changes.  However, Luke has to date worked to
form consensus on the opentts-dev mailing list before making
significant changes.  Progress in the last several weeks has been
truly outstanding, and I for one am happy that opentts is in good
hands, and that I probably wont have to go digging into this code
anymore :-)

Bill

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:09 AM, A <avalon at friendofpooh.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speechd mailing list
>> Speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
>> http://lists.freebsoft.org/mailman/listinfo/speechd
>>
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