For long time, I was browsing Internet looking for (free) good TTS software for Linux, but I haven't found one. At first I thought I will write my own TTS system, but I may be to lazy for writing it from first line. I am thinking to join TTS open source project as developer or as part of testing team, the project which is still alive and will be like this for some time.
I worked some time with Festival developed in Edinburgh University, looks like this project is freezing now and main language SIOD is too complex for me to understand. Then I thought I'd change to FreeTTS but it's developed by some guys from Sun, but again, the company is part of other company now, for this reason, I'm not sure about FreeTTS destiny.
I would like to spend some time to work on TTS technologies. So, my kind friends, what will you advise me? Please bring arguments in your answers, like, why do you think this project will live a long life.
Thanks

While release schemes or the date of the latest release should not be seen as a qualitatively good indication of project longevity, if you look at name, version and release date there's a few projects alive: Festfox 2.1 01/2007, FreeTTS 1.2.2 03/2009, eSpeak 1.43.03 03/2010, Festival 2.0.95 04/2010. With respect to project longevity: as long as your code is released under a compatible OSS license your efforts are not wasted because any fork, split, schism or other project may see improvements due to your code or ideas you put forward. I hope you see that as a win-win situation.

//NTLB