On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 05:07, Harsh Jain wrote:
Hello Everybody,
We are a team of undergraduates from CSE Department IIT Bombay,working on an Indian Language Text to Speech Synthesizer. Our project homepage is at
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vani/
It runs only on Linux now :).Might be of interest and help to some. Its in development stage rightnow.
Thanks, harsh
Another extremely important advantage of putting it on Sourceforge is that the project has a life beyond being a mere BTech project. The code then has a chance to reach out to the community and benefit others. Other individuals, hopefully with more experience can enhance the work you do and teach you better ways of doing the same thing.
"Free/Open Source" within a "Closed User Group" is, in my opinion, a terrible idea. Once the students leave, the code lies forgotten on some random hard disk; someone else comes along and says, "Let's start writing an Indian language TTS" and the whole bloody chain starts all over again.
One of the saddest moments of my life was at one of the IITs. A friend of mine who is a professor there told me that they had developed an Indian language search engine. I said, "Great. Is the code available? Give it to me." I got the shock of my life when he said, "Oh! Our hard disk crashed and therefore we lost the code." He saw the look of disgust on my face and said, "Don't worry. We can redo it from scratch in another three months." It is such a crime to waste time reinventing the wheel, especially in a country like India where resources are so scarce. If that code was on sourceforge, such a criminal lapse would not have happened.
Harsh, I would strongly urge you to persuade your professors that the Vani project should be hosted on a community web site under GPL at the earliest possible instance.
Venky