Re: ibm tts run-time engine purchasing alternatives

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "J" == John G Heim <jheim@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    J> ... when you think about it, the vast majority of people are
    J> going to expect to get a package that they can just install
    J> with a single command or two. 

When you actually think about it, this is not true.  As Bucky Fuller
once said "Design a system that even a fool can use, and only fools
will use it" :)

The first demonstrable factual truth is there are many people today
using emacspeak and speakup, and _neither_ system is installed with a
single command or two.  Millions of people use Windows, and it is a
nightmare to install.

The second demonstrable factual truth is there are many people today
willing to put real money on the table for the ViaVoice runtime for
Linux, not a plug and play system, just the shared libraries compiled
against a glib from /this/ millenium.  No push-buttons, no hand-holding
1-800 numbers, no everything to everybody software that no one will
ever use.  Just the runtime.  That's it.  Anything more and we'd be
spending the next month of midnight oil desperately trying to /extract/
the ViaVoice runtime libs from the otherwise useless package so we
can graft it into the software we actually want to use.

I'm with Robert on this: the first company that will actually /sell/ me
the useful ViaVoice runtime kit will get my money.

This is kinda frustrating.  

My friend Paul has been without his emacspeak machine since _last_
spring because we blew a capacitor in the powersupply and fried his
hard drive, and I've been unable to duplicate the old machine under
modern Linux distros.  I tried every published trick to bootstrap the
old VV libs.  FLite kept crashing, Java synth jabbers jibberish. We
tried speakup, it drove him nuts.  We tried every existing free
softsynth, none worked. We bought the saccent, it sucked.  We're
stalled.

How about this: Are there ten people on this list willing to pre-buy
the VV runtime for $30 each?  Could we somehow form an emacspeak
Outloud Co-op to buy bulk licenses from IBM and then sell the runtime
as an Emacspeak fund-raiser?  it's no different than buying the
Soft-talk except that the money could go to helping defray T.V.Raman's
considerable costs managing this thing.

We'd buy one, Robert will take another, so that only leaves 8 more to
break even, and everything beyond is pure profit ...

Just a thought.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym at linux.ca>
"what I need is a job that doesn't interfere with my work"

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