freature request for ibmtts module

[William Hubbs]

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

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