Announcing the OpenTTS project, a fork of speech-dispatcher

[Tomas Cerha]

Hello,

just my few personal thoughts...

While I respect anyone's freedom to take on the work that we started and 
continue in a
direction he believes is the best, I am not quite convinced that making a fork 
is
necessary and helpful.

The announcement started by a question "Why Fork Speech Dispatcher and Related
Projects?", but I can't find anything that would answer the question for me 
even if I
pretty much agree with all what was written below.  It is true, that GPL grants 
the
freedom to do it, that the importance of Speech Dispatcher grew over the time 
and that
the non-profit organization Brailcom didn't find resources to finance the 
development in
the last two years.  But I fail to find a convincing reason in these facts.

Brailcom has always officially supported the work done by Luke Yelavich and 
others.  We
linked Luke's git from the official Speech Dispatcher web page and we were 
trying to
promote this work where possible.  We also put at least some minimal effort into
reviewing how the development continues and plan to make an official release 
(yes,
without being able to promise the exact date) and we constantly put significant 
effort
in attempts to find resources for continuation of the work and we believe we 
will
succeed (though, as we announced, we can not promise anything, as it does not 
depend on
our decision).

I am just afraid, that having two projects with two names and different 
directions will
not be really practical.  What particularly is the key problem in the current 
model
where the actual development takes place in Luke's git repo?  I don't say it is 
ideal,
but maybe there is less to do to make it better, then making a fork and 
renaming...

Best regards,

Tomas Cerha