open letter to Brailcom regarding Speech Dispatcher and SpeechD-Up

[Jan Buchal]

Dear colleagues,

Brailcom is a fully professional non-profit company, which realizes a
whole set of projects for the visually handicapped. The company gets its
financial resources for these projects from EU grants or grants of the
country Czech Republic. Another important source are commercial
activities, mainly in the field of development of information database
systems.

Brailcom has its own team of highly qualified developers and managers.
The main criteria for project realizations are:

- The need for it and the meaning of the project
- Our ability to realize the project in high quality

In the case of the Speech Dispatcher project, as the head of the
Brailcom company, I cannot currently promise any resources for future
development. We however still believe that this project plays a key role
and is worth of support. I'm happy that the key developers of Free
Accessibility also consider it as significant. However, I have to remind
you that this was not the case in the past and that the change came only
recently. It happened with the requirement to move to D-BUS, which meant
that it was necessary to leave the old concept of Gnome Speech and find
a new way.

Brailcom has in the past offered and presented its vision about the
functionality of the speech interface, including written presentations.
Some time ago, we have also started working on a new implementation of
Speech Dispatcher, which was based on the experiences from past
development and was also bringing completely new features. The feedback
on this vision and its new implementation was however minimal from the
key accessibility developers. As a result, Brailcom become alone in the
project.

Our current view is not different in any way and we still consider the
path outlined as the right one. If enough resources can be found, this
means concrete man hours in the form of paid developers or volunteers,
we would like to continue this project.

As you surely know, Speech Dispatcher is a Free Software project. This
means that if somebody has a different vision and enough resources to
realize it, there is no obstacle for him to follow this way.

In any case, Brailcom currently still offers a stable environment on the
freebsoft.org development portal, as well as management of the project,
including a search for new sources for its realization.

We will be happy to welcome new members to our development team, who
want to identify themselves with the long term goals of our
organization. The doors are open to everyone in this sense.

Yours sincerely,

Jan Buchal -- Chief Executive Officer

Brailcom, o.p.s.
Mob: +420608023021
http://www.brailcom.org