Re: [Savannah-users] Re: Hosting of FLOSS project that links against CUDA library

[Eric S. Johansson]

Sylvain Beucler wrote:

> Free software users mustn't be enticed to use proprietary software.
> If there are multiple backends, the best (or equal-best) backend must
> rely on free software.  If CUDA is a suboptimal (or equal-best)
> backend, that's ok. If CUDA is a better backend than a free software
> alternative, that's not ok.

apologies for ripping the conversation sideways but, there's one axiom which 
overrides this and that is the area of handicapped accessibility. I feel it's 
more important from social responsibility perspective to provide accessibility 
aids to disabled users without discrimination as to being free software or not. 
What matters is that the software should serve their needs at first so that they 
can work, play, and generally participate in the online world.

In other words, disability support trumps politics.

The reason this subject is near and dear to my heart is that I am disabled. I'm 
stuck on Windows because I must use speech recognition and there is nothing 
comparable to NaturallySpeaking. I will be the first to point out that nuance 
displays the worst characteristics of any closed source company in terms of 
ignoring users, hiding information about how to interface to the program, 
discouraging users from doing anything to make their life better.  the license 
agreement prevents us from even sharing any enhancements that are available in a 
more expensive product.  We put up with it because there are no other options. 
All of the other toolkits out there like Sphinx, Julius etc. are toys. They are 
millions of dollars and decades of development away. This is unacceptable many 
reasons but the most important is I don't have time to wait.

so I find it rather frustrating that on top of the typical geek "care I?" 
Attitude towards disability support, disabled users of speech recognition get 
either indifference or hostility because we dare use proprietary application to 
function in the world.  I would love to have another option for inputting text. 
I would love to have an option that would let me write code again and I would 
love for option to be completely free software. I've been looking for options 
and there aren't any.

Apologies for the rant but this is a real sore point with me. I contributed a 
fair amount of free software before it was called such. Now that I'm disabled, I 
can't participate. It is almost impossible to find folks willing to participate 
in developing free software for the hard disabilities, the ones where nobody has 
built a working model they can chase.  and this brings us back to the big point 
to the beginning. What I have tried to build projects for speech recognition 
dependent users, as soon as people find out we need to use NaturallySpeaking, a 
proprietary product at the core, I get all such excuses why we shouldn't down to 
outright refusal to participate. Nobody seems to give a shit that that attitude 
keeps disabled people, disabled programmers unemployed and pushes them into 
careers with substantially lower earning capacity and all the other features of 
downward mobility.

--- eric

Speech recognition in use. It makes mistakes. I correct some.