one step closer to the possibility of linux on the bn/vn

[Sabahattin Gucukoglu]

On 15 Apr 2003 at 11:20, Gregory Nowak pronounced thusly:

> Hi Sabahattin and all.

Hi again,

--snip--
> While it is true that the bn is not supported under speakup, I believe
> that PDI is the one to blame here, since they don't want to release
> there specs without nondisclosure agreements. 

What do they want, blood?  We forked out enough for the unit as it is.  
They're very willing to give away the braille display information, proudly 
announcing it to their customers.  No, they may be doing us a disservice 
in the long run, but I think this is the result of preventing themselves 
from ending up in deep water.  I'm fairly certain that as a licensee of 
the technology they are simply obliged to be careful about their agreement 
with the licenser which, even supposing it constituted no risk in 
provision of information to the blind and visually impaired community, and 
only for the units in which it is used, the concept of liberating the 
information in open source would be considered massive disclosure of the 
information and therefore breach their own agreement.  I wonder if they 
would be so concerned if support for their synthesiser were written by 
themselves for Linux (as say a module) and released closed source *choak*. 
 I of course would dislike this immensely and would consider my system or 
kernel tainted should it happen.

But don't worry.  I am aware that their are a couple of projects getting 
the Keynote SA working under Linux, most notably the EmacsSpeak Speech 
Server which appears to be in alpha indefinitely and which I haven't 
tried.  Any updates, news is welcome.  I will have an opportunity to 
install IBM's OS/2 in the near future, which has support for both pre-93 
and post-93 Keynote SA synthesizers.  The tts files used to drive IBM's 
excellent Screen Reader/2 may be viewed in plain text from OS/2's 
synthesizer configuration notebook.  Therefore, the meaning and use of the 
commands issued to the synthesisers can be gleaned and, much against 
anyone's will and a signature, revealed to the world.  I really am 
considering this hard, despite the possible implications.  Still, I will 
first talk to PDI and ask their reasoning, to see if any misunderstanding 
has been made so far by anyone or myself.  As is the righteous way of open 
source and the concept of experimentation and unorthodox probing, I am 
hopeful that at last the possibility of using Speakup, YASR or anything 
else with my portable Keynote SA will end this fiasco.

Alright, no more time for complacency *grin*

> Also, as for modularizing speakup, I believe that Kirk, the main
> developer of speakup, stated on the speakup list a few days back that
> the speakup 2.00 tree which will be in cvs shortly, will have the
> ability to build speakup as modules. 

Hmm, I'll look into that, of course.

> Also, as for IBM's via voice TTS, it is dead under unix, and the
> development has stopped as far as I've heard, so that's one less option for
> a speech engine.

Well, if you can find an old copy of the binaries floating about, great.  
But it isn't worth going for it when it isn't updated along with the 
Windows version, etc.  Still, support should probably still be maintained 
for it.  I am disappointed with IBM; here again they sacrifice good for 
considerably less worthy products, IMHO.

Oh, a correction from last post, it's Mips, not Fips.  Damned 
spellchecker...

> Greg

Cheers,
Sabahattin

-- 

Thought for the day:
    Book (n): a utensil used to pass time while waiting
    for the TV repairman.

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