Re: Announcing the OpenTTS project, a fork of speech-dispatcher

[Tomas Cerha <cerha brailcom org>]

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