[DECtalk] Software DECtalk availability (was Re: using dectalk with orca in ubuntu)

[Jason J.G. White]

Thank you, Josh. I think Mr. Blazie is a credible source, and of course, 
his company would have been in communication with the new DECtalk owner 
for commercial licencing reasons.

In the recent past, and perhaps currently, DECtalk has been receiving 
free maintenance and enhancement from a community of people who 
evidently have the necessary expertise. It will be interesting to find 
out whether the new company decides to let that work continue. If 
they're planning to allow it to be downloaded for certain non-commercial 
uses, then it may indeed be in their interests to leave it open to bug 
reports and code contributions. Of course, they may adopt an entirely 
different strategy.

I am interested in contributing bug reports, at least, and if I could 
fix any of the issues (such as mispronunciations), then I would 
contribute those changes too.

Any significant, long-term maintenance will require people with the 
right expertise, some of whom have obviously contributed a lot of work 
to it in recent years. My understanding is that any non-trivial work on 
it would require a specialized academic background in computer science, 
software engineering, computational linguistics and digital signal 
processing, as well as considerable software development experience. I 
don't have any of that background.

If you're interested in reading more, I found this paper on DECtalk to 
be informative.

ftp://eddie.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/macro/DEC/DTJ/DTJK01/DTJK01PF.PDF

On 3/2/24 15:49, Josh Kennedy wrote:
> Brian Blazie said that the new owners of dectalk  said that we blind people can use it as long as it is for our own personal useand is not used in a commercial product. If you want to use it in a commercial product, you have to license it. but we are allowed to use it for free for our own personal use  Brian Blazie of Blazie Engineering told me this.
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Feb 3, 2024, at 10:45, Jason J.G. White via Dectalk <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>> On 3/2/24 10:18, Bryan Mckinnish wrote:
>>> How can I get dectalk to work with orca in ubuntu mate?
>>>
>>> Also, what github address would I have to use to get it if it's prebuilt?
>>>
>> Actually, I wouldn't download it from anywhere at the moment. There is apparently a new company with rights to DECtalk now, so the best strategy would be to wait a while until we find out officially about its availability to blind users of Linux. The matter was recently raised on the Orca mailing list.
>>
>> If I were making the decision today, I wouldn't download anything.
>>
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