[Opentts-dev] merging opentts and speechd was Re: Fwd: Re: OpenTTS 0.1 released.

[Jan Buchal]

Hello,

let me express my opinion of both the past and the current events regarding
the Speech Dispatcher project and the newly created OpenTTS project. I am
the founder and long-term director of the Brailcom company, a company
founded to help the visually-impaired. The nature of the company is
non-profit, even though I am convinced that is not important. What is
important is that our company employs people who create and work on
projects that they believe can substantially help the visually-impaired.

Someone can also find it important that I am myself fully blind and am
involved in this for nearly 20 years. Brailcom, as I have already mentioned
in another letter, is a professional organization; that means its staff are
paid full-time employees. That does not mean that I don't want to
collaborate with volunteers, but rather that I consider it necessary and
obvious that everyone is appropriately rewarded for their work. We do not
live in a society without money and money is, as you know, important for
our lives. Of course I highly value everyone who devotes time to the
others, however that does not mean that someone who is paid would be
helping less than others, or that they would not deserve my admiration and
respect. The only thing that decides is the quality work and whether the
work is really beneficial.

I am convinced that long-term projects that require highly-qualified
manpower have to be financed in their basis, that those who are core
members of the of the development team must be sufficiently materially
secured so that they can work on the project on a long-term basis.
Volunteers are and can be a substantial help, but they rather suppport and
supplement the core developers of the project. Volunteer also has to make a
living and if their life situation changes, then they often no longer have
much time to support a specific project. In order to preserve continuity
and quality of any project, it is necessary that the core developers are
not, if possible, changed, so that the ideas that seem simple in the
beginning, can really be realized. To achieve that, a lot of time and deep
experience is needed.

If I have not said anything new so far, or if someone is bored by my
thoughts, try to continue in reading so that you possibly gain the big
picture of the issue. That means how the development is organized, or what
is the process of developing projects in our company.

Every project, including Speech Dispatcher, has its responsible person,
a.k.a. maintainer. Apart from this person, so called opponents are involved
in the project who supply direct feedback to the person working on the
problem. Opponent does not do testing, but real opponency, where one
developer investigates and contemplates proposals or implementation of the
other developer. Internal testing of course takes place as well, before we
invite broader public to testing.

As has been already said, Speech Dispatcher is and continues to be one of
the key projects of Brailcom. The origins of Speech Dispatcher reach
sometimes into year 1997, even though its current implementation is dated
approximately 10 years ago. During the whole development, it was sometimes
easy and sometimes hard to secure the needed funds from various grants and
dotations. Because I however want that experienced and capable developers
stay in our company, I have to manage to offer them appropriate financial
backing. They of course are not doing the work because of money, but there
is no doubt they deserve the reward. Not only because we are successful at
securing financial resources is the Brailcom team stable and many of its
members have been in Brailcom for nearly as long as is the history of
Speech Dispatcher.

It is however not always possible to secure finances specifically for the
development of Speech Dispatcher. It is often hard to explain to the public
officers of the state that Speech Dispatcher is something that can help the
visually-impaired. Brailcom is developing various other projects like
electronic language textbok, digital language school, or chemistry for the
visually-impaired -- those are not directly related to Speech Dispatcher,
but in their budgets, they were or are partially supporting the development
of Speech Dispatcher.

As I have already said, Speech Dispatcher has been with us for more than 10
years and also much sooner than for example gnome speech. We have attempted
for a very long time for Speech Dispatcher to become the default speech
interface for the Free Accessibility Infrastructure and in this sense I
have conducted numerous talks with the managers of the company SUN. I hoped
that it will be recognized that this component of accessibility
infrastructure, with its architecture, is very important and that funding
for its support will be found. So far nothing has changed in this regard
and Speech Dispatcher is financed solely from the funds of Brailcom. Last
time I made this offer was in bugzilla where the issue about replacing
gnome speech was being discussed. However I also mentioned there that we
are searching for further funds so that we can continue the development
with more intensity. It did not work out as fast as we wished. But we have
some funds available right now so we could intensify the development of
Speech Dispatcher. I can assure everyone that the efforts of volunteers
around the OpenTTS project did not speed up anything in this matter. The
project from which the development of Speech Dispatcher is currently being
financed was approved in the end of December last year, we just had to wait
for signing the contract with the Government of the Czech Republic and then
of course wait for the financial funds themselves. That the renewal of work
on Speech Dispatcher happened at the same time as the activities of people
around OpenTTS is a coincidence. It is not correct to assume different
conclusions.

If it is pointed out that Brailcom did nothing during the last year and a
half, that it was impossible to continue in the development, it is
necessary to state that such conclusions are not based on proper analysis
of the situation. Yes, Brailcom did not have the needed funds available,
but it was open to cooperation with volunteers, which naturally does not
mean that we resigned from leading the project. I think no obstacle was in
the way of tighter cooperation and the same is true also now.

I understand the current state as that there is a distrust towards the
ability of Brailcom to successfully manage the project, that maybe there is
generally a distrust that companies can manage the needed support, or
rather the belief that a group of volunteers is more reliable because they
are not dependent on financial resources. I cannot agree with that. As I
have mentioned, I am convinced that such serious and important projects
like projects from the area of Free Accessibility require permanent
financial support, and that without this support it is possible to achieve
something but it is not possible to bring a real alternative to proprietary
applications and keep pace with the development of IT.

It was being pointed out with respect to us that lately, that means before
the entry of the OpenTTS group into the development of Speech Dispatcher,
that Speech Dispatcher was unstable and unreliable. Also in this case it is
necessary to analyze the situation properly and only after that come to
proper conclusions. As many of you know, the big revolution for everyone
needing a sound output was the deployment of the PulseAudio system. That
however introduced many problems. As soon as PulseAudio appeared, we began
to intensively communicate with Mr. Poetering, the main PulseAudio
developer, and discuss how Speech Dispatcher should use PulseAudio. That
meant hundreds of hours of work and many changes even in PulseAudio itself.
PulseAudio itself was however being developed rapidly, so it was not
possible to find a stable solution quickly, as we wished. Now, thanks also
to volunteers, we are in a state where communication with PulseAudio partly
works. Current state is however still provisional and should be from the
long-term perspective understood as just a workaround. Someone could
challenge this with the fact that similar instability manifested itself
with ALSA. Yes, but why? Many people were seeking answer and even today
some questions remain unanswered. It is again necessary to take into
account that Speech Dispatcher was often using a very unstable sound system
and sound card drivers developed with the reverse engineering method.

Back to that distrust towards Brailcom, the distrust of whether the
Brailcom team is capable to run such an important project as Speech
Dispatcher. Firstly I am very pleased that Speech Dispatcher is seen by
many as an important project and that they overtook care of it, even though
I think it would be better that the fork did not take place. I am convinced
that Brailcom always met its commitments and proved that is has a team of
qualified developers that are capable to lead such an important project. Of
course I cannot manage to convince others to think the same. I just ask you
to draw conclusions from a real, proper analysis of the situation so that
we do not unnecessarily waste the already limited resources that can be
used for those that need our help.

I therefore propose to those who decided to fork Speech Dispatcher to
consider whether this way, that is the way of fork, is really more
beneficial than the previous model of development, to consider whether it
is possible to have faith in the leadership of Brailcom and the developers
of Brailcom and to consider whether it is possible to accept the offer that
I made when I was recently asked to state how much time can we devote to
the development of Speech Dispatcher. I can't under pressure promise
something that we cannot fulfill. I can however promise that we will pursue
the project if there is a real interest in Speech Dispatcher, that we
currently have funds to lead the project, and that we will have the funds
also in near future. Everything however depends on many circumstances that
are unpredictable, so it would not be serious to claim that it will not be
a problem to secure a stable amount of workhours. There are many problems
in the area of Free Accessibility that have to be solved and sometimes it
seems like we are trying to extinguishing several fires at the same time.
Despite that, I am an optimist and I believe that many things can change,
for example by finding a common way with those that feel they will do the
Speech Dispatcher project better good by forking it.

To finally summarize the current state and restate the offer, I say that we
currently have funds that sufficiently secure the subsequent development of
Speech Dispatcher and that if we are joined by skilful and willing
volunteers who are willing to respect Brailcom's way of development, then
we can significantly advance the project. It is also possible that after
some time I will offer some volunteers a way of paid cooperation. I am not
saying this to "bribe" someone, but because I do not find it natural that
someone works for the others without being paid.

With friendly regards,
Jan Buchal -- CEO
Brailcom, o.p.s.