New maintainer of Speech Dispatcher is Luke Yelavich

[Luke Yelavich]

Hi Hynek, all,
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 07:42:13PM EST, Hynek Hanke wrote:
> 
> Dear users,
>  Dear developers of Speech Dispatcher,
> 
> I am happy to announce that the new maintainer of Speech Dispatcher is now 
> Luke Yelavich. Luke has been a long-term contributor and he has been one of 
> the most active. He also already maintains its Ubuntu package. I see that he 
> really cares about this our project very much and I have no doubt that he 
> will lead it in a good way.
> 
> BRAILCOM,o.p.s. still supports Speech Dispatcher and we will always be around 
> for possible consultations. 

I would firstly like to thank Hynek and Brailcom for speech-dispatcher. This 
fine piece of software wouldn't be where it is today without their tireless 
efforts over the years. Speech-dispatcher is at the centre of many a *nix 
user's day to day work, and has held up overall, meeting the needs of its 
users. In their maintainership of speech-dispatcher, Brailcom have always been 
very receptive of patches, feature suggestions, and discussion about the future 
of the project. When the OpenTTS fork was made back in 2010, Brailcom handled 
the situation with grace, understanding, and courtesy, and were open to 
resolving differences, and getting the project going again. These qualities 
resulted in the developers of OpenTTS returning to the fold, and saw the 
improvements made in OpenTTS encorporated into speech-dispatcher proper. 
Brailcom also offered community members the opportunity to be more involved 
with speech-dispatcher development, by allowing some contributors to be code 
reviewers and committers.

On behalf of all developers and users, I would like to wish Hynek and his 
colleagues at Brailcom all the best. I am sure we haven't heard the last from 
you, and any contributions you wish to make will always be welcome and warmly 
received.

I would also like to thank Brailcom for giving me the opportunity to maintain 
speech-dispatcher. In my 10 years of contributing to open source software, I 
have not yet been given an opportunity to maintain a piece of open source 
software, and have not had enough of an itch to scratch to start a project of 
my own. I appreciate the trust Brailcom has placed in me, and I sincerely hope 
I am as good a maintainer going forward as Brailcom has been thus far.

I would also like to thank Brailcom for the continued use of their server 
resources to host the speech-dispatcher project git repository, website, bug 
tracker, and release tarballs. This is much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank you, the users. Speech-dispatcher would not be 
what it is today without your input and contributions. It has been a pleasure 
working with you all, and as the new speech-dispatcher maintainer, I look 
forward to continuing to work with you all in our desire to make 
speech-dispatcher even better.

In the coming weeks, I hope to send out another email with an updated roadmap 
for the project. Since the roadmap discussion back in 2010, a lot has changed 
in the free and open source software ecosystem, and these bigger changes will 
likely have a bearing on the roadmap going forward. I won't go into specifics 
now, thats for the roadmap email.

I also plan to reach out to the package maintainers of the bigger distros known 
to have speech-dispatcher users, and extend an offer for them to participate in 
development and discussion. If you are a package maintainer for a distro, 
please feel free to get in touch, either privately or on the mailing list, and 
make yourself known. I would also be interested in hearing from developers who 
write software that makes use of speech-dispatcher.

With warmest thanks and regards to all.
Luke Yelavich
Speech Dispatcher project maintainer.