Tux droid isn't free

Ok, so I should have checked an odd message I saw when I installed the 32 bit debs, but now I know that tux droid is not entirely free.

As some of you will know I've had some spectacular bad luck with failing hardware both at home and at work recently. A few weeks ago I started to see the worrying signs of impending catastrophic disk failure on imladris. I bought a new SATA disk, and figured I might as well install an amd64 system (I was previous running an amd64 kernel with a completely 32 bit userland). The process went nice and smoothly (the Debian installer is so much better than it was 3 - 4 years ago). I'm still installing bits and pieces that have been forgotten, and I still have some other problems (can't listen to iplayer radio for example).

Today I resolved to reinstall the manager for tux, and found that the .deb files were available only for i386. Not daunted, I happily downloaded the tarballs to compile, but got lots of errors clearly stemming from a 32 bit / 64 bit mismatch. I found a forum article discussing a library that was packaged in i386 (why?) and downloaded the source and recompiled it for 64 bit. The same message persists, and then I found an unhappier thread. It looks like the whole project is using a closed source text to speech (TTS) system.

They are apparently producing a 64 bit version, but it kind of defeats the point... a poster boy product for an open source operating system, and parts of it are closed. Even if it can be compiled for i386 and amd64, what about the rest?

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