On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 11:35:28AM +0100, Mario Lang wrote: > Well, I partly agree with you, but I dont think kicking > non-free as a whole is a good idea. I'd really love > if every piece of software I need would be free, and in main, > but there are exceptions. See #167189 for an example. > Mbrola is the ONLY speech synth available right now > which supports substantially more languages then just > english. This is a very important thing for > allowing visually impaired computer users to work with > Linux. I'd be happy if they'd release sources of course, > but it appears they are limited by a contract they > have with another company, so it seems we dont have > any chance to free mbrola. So as long as no one > develops a diphone synthesizer which comes > with 25 different langauges under the GPL, I'd really like > to see non-free stay. I'm no expert on speech synth technologies, but I know 'festival' is a speech synthesizer that does support more than one language (though not yet 25, AFAIK). Is festival feature-poor or poor-quality compared to mbrola, or is it just a matter of implementing the other languages? > > Do we serve our users by making it easier for them to become dependent > > on new forms of non-free software? > I agreed to the social contract, as you did, and I remember > clearly when reading no.5 I thought to myself: > "yes, that is a good thing to have." I also agreed to the Social Contract in its entirety. However, acknowledging that our users sometimes need non-free software, does not automatically lead to the conclusion that continuing to add more non-free software to our archive is in our users' best interest. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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