Hi Reto,

The TTS (text to speech) engine used is espeak, and is available on many linux distros. It is relied upon by thousands with visual impairments, and those with reading disabilities - myself included. You must be new to HPR as we have been using espeak for years, and were only recently able to negotiate a contract with Lyn (text2wave/festival) after her noncompete-agreements from the lottalinuxlinks.com podcast expired ;-).

Unfortunately the site you posted left me wanting when it came to hearing the other side of the story. But as you say it can be difficult to find accurate information on the Internet, especially one that is reliable and trustworthy. I would always suggest to go to the source of truth first. In this case it's best to start with Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) itself. Sure enough on the main FSF page there are two articles "Statement of FSF board on election of Richard Stallman"[1] and another "RMS addresses the free software community"[2]

We have interviewed RMS on episode hpr0271[3] and hpr1116[4], so it would be great to get him on again to discuss this. Can you reach out to him and/or the FSF to see if they would be interested in recording another interview ? Be sure to mention we only use Free Software for the recording [5], and that we can release it under the CC-BY-NC-SA[6] if desired. I think the whole "not release in mp3" thing is no longer a problem, but if it is we can deal with that as well.

In the meantime I will put together a similar show to this using their statements, and post it as a counter point show.