freature request for ibmtts module

[Steve Holmes]

I'm in full agreement with William on this one.  In the terms of
software and life cycle, IBMTTS is dead! It has gone well beyond it's
end of life.  The developer has abandoned it and has no intent on
releasing the source code so it is impossible for anyone to fix it or
make it compatible with newer run time environments, etc.  Quite
frankly, the thought of having to cludge around all over the place and
use ancient runtime libries just to make it work, is such a bad idea.

It's situations like this is precisely why closed source projects are
such a problem.  They get abandoned up stream and there goes your
support.  I've said this before; I will never attempt to run IBMTTS or
Voxen or any of those projects on my system especially as long as I
would be required to use old, ancient, outdated and unsupported
libraries.  Whenever I hear the necessary steps to get these synths
working on any modern system, it just doesn't sound worth the effort.
Sure a bit of work is necessary to make a Linux machine accessible but
it needs to become more stream-lined if you want the masses to be able
to take advantage of it.  I think this has happened already in other
areas of accessibility but not for this synth.

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 09:26:31AM +1100, Bart Bunting wrote:
> Hi William and list,
> 
> I understand your point about ibmtts being closed source and unsupported
> etc etc.
> However there is just no getting around that ibmtts is still the most
> responsive, intelligible and configureable (in terms of voice changes)
> engine we have available.  Of course this is my opinion only.  Espeak is
> making great progress though.
> 
> This being said I personally would welcome anything that made using
>  ibmtts with SD easier.
> 
> I guess it comes down to if anyone wants to put the cycles into making
>  this change or not.
> 
> I personally have gone to much effort over the years to continue having
> ibmtts working with SD, emacspeak etc on my computers.  Currently I
> don't have ibmtts working on my 64 bit system with SD.  I am running it
> in a chroot for the emacspeak speech server.  
>  
> 
> Regards
> 
> Bart
> 
>  r 
> On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:38:28 -0500, William Hubbs <w.d.hubbs at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> > Hi Halim,
> > 
> > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:37:09PM +0200, Halim Sahin wrote:
> > > hi,
> > > Current situation:
> > > Currently sd_ibmtts links against libibmeci and libetidev which are not
> > > free and the distributors can't ship a compiled sd_ibmtts module with
> > > their speechd package.
> > > 
> > > Suggestion:
> > > There is a ibmtts-sdk available on sourceforge.net which could be used
> > > to create/refactor the sd_ibmtts module.
> > > If the module doesn't link against the libibmeci by dynamically loading
> > > it at runtime (dlopen) the package could be shipped with the
> > > distributions.
> > > Afaik the bsd license is compatible with gpl/lgpl. We could ship the
> > > eci.h file with speechd package and enable the compilation of the module
> > > (at least on 32 bit systems).
> > > The module itself needs to dlopen the libibmeci at runtime and could be
> > > build without having the real working library at compile time.
> > 
> > better suggestion, imho:
> > 
> > IBMTTS is depricated.  It uses extremely old libstdc++, is closed
> > source, non-free and more importantly not supported.  It is also 32 bit
> > only, which is another serious issue since 64 bit systems are becoming
> > more common.
> > 
> > I'll be the first to say that the voices it has are quick and
> > responsive.  I use eloquence on Windows and like it, but, I feel that on
> > linux we need to be advocating another solution.  Not so much because it
> > is non-free, but because it has been abandoned by the upstream
> > developers, and for licensing reasons will never be released to the
> > community as source.
> > 
> > In other words, I feel that we shouldn't go out of our way to support
> > it since it is not being maintained by the developers.
> > 
> > I realize this is just my opinion.  Iam willing to work with the rest of
> > the community on this issue, but I feel that I needed to state my
> > opinion.
> > 
> > What does everyone else think?
> > 
> > William
> > 
> Non-text part: application/pgp-signature
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speechd mailing list
> > Speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
> > http://lists.freebsoft.org/mailman/listinfo/speechd
> From: Bart Bunting <bart at bunting.net.au>
> Subject: Re: freature request for ibmtts module
> To: Halim Sahin <halim.sahin at t-online.de>, speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
> Bcc: bart at ursys.com.au
> In-Reply-To: <20101019203709.GA28381 at gentoo.local>
> References: <20101019203709.GA28381 at gentoo.local>
> 
> On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:37:09 +0200, Halim Sahin <halim.sahin at t-online.de> 
> wrote:
> > hi,
> > Current situation:
> > Currently sd_ibmtts links against libibmeci and libetidev which are not
> > free and the distributors can't ship a compiled sd_ibmtts module with
> > their speechd package.
> > 
> > Suggestion:
> > There is a ibmtts-sdk available on sourceforge.net which could be used
> > to create/refactor the sd_ibmtts module.
> > If the module doesn't link against the libibmeci by dynamically loading
> > it at runtime (dlopen) the package could be shipped with the
> > distributions.
> > Afaik the bsd license is compatible with gpl/lgpl. We could ship the
> > eci.h file with speechd package and enable the compilation of the module
> > (at least on 32 bit systems).
> > The module itself needs to dlopen the libibmeci at runtime and could be
> > build without having the real working library at compile time.
> > 
> > 
> > Please don't answer that this concept will be more unstable etc. Don't
> > forget that the eci interface isn't new and wmaybe it won't get any
> > updates in the future.
> > Unfortunately many people are using it and the mailinglists contain many
> > questions about how to building ibmtts support in speechd.
> > What do you think?
> > BR.
> > halim
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speechd mailing list
> > Speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
> > http://lists.freebsoft.org/mailman/listinfo/speechd
> 
> -- 
> 
> Bart Bunting
> 
> URSYS Pty. Ltd                                                             
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