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SFC_Questionnaire
Liblouis is a free software library that translates both text into braille and braille into text. It is an important component in many open-source screen readers, such as NVDA and Orca. It is also used in Android and iOS for braille support, in braille printers, in braille note takers and in the DAISY Pipeline, which is a framework for the production of accessible content for people with print disabilities. As such, liblouis is a crucial component in any braille-reader’s computing experience.
We have been operating as individuals for a long time successfully. Christian is employed by the Swiss Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired (SBS) and works on liblouis as part of his work hours. Bert is self-employed and his work on liblouis is partly paid through the DAISY Consortium. Therefore, we haven’t seen an immediate need for a legal umbrella for our activities up to now.
But a few events as of late made us realize that a legal entity would be beneficial:
- The original maintainer recently passed away, making it apparent that we need some formal way to pass the baton to the next generation.
- One of the original sponsors mistakenly let go of our domain
(
liblouis.org). Our attempts to get the domain back were not successful and we were forced to migrate to a new domain (liblouis.io). Clearly, it would be better if our assets were held by some legal entity. - We assume that the liblouis library is used in many devices and yet we have no way of knowing if they all comply with the license. But even if we were by chance to find out about a license violation, we would not have the legal clout to act on this. We’re hoping that the backing of SFC would give us more leverage in that regard.
- A legal entity and status as a non-profit would make it easier to collect donations and to take part in events such as the Google Summer of Code.
- We have no other applications pending.
- We are looking for more than just asset holding and accounting. We are also interested in copyleft compliance. That is why we prefer SFC over SPI.
- Theoretically, we could join the GNU project, which would offer support for copyleft compliance and maybe asset stewardship. We are a fairly GNUish project given the license, build tools and texinfo documentation. However, we are afraid that we’d have to comply with a lot of additional requirements (coding standards, migration of code and website to the GNU infrastructure), which we’re presently not able to handle.
Liblouis is an open-source library that provides a braille translator (text to braille) and back-translator (braille to text). It consists of the library itself, a few associated binaries for testing and debugging, and around 200 so-called tables, which provide definitions for the braille for specific languages. There is no universal braille; it usually differs from language to language. It is likely that liblouis has the most comprehensive language support of all existing braille translators. Limited support for math braille is also included.
Due to its nature as a library, liblouis is embedded in many user-facing programs, such as screen readers (NVDA or Orca), braille embossers (from ViewPlus or from Index Braille), braille note takers and mobile devices (Android and iOS). See also the wiki page for a list of products that use liblouis[fn:1].
| Part | License |
|---|---|
| Library | LGPLv2.1+ |
| Tables | mostly LGPLv2.1+; a few LGPLv3+ |
| Tools | GPLv3+ |
| Tests | mostly GNU All-Permissive License |
| Documentation | LGPLv3+ |
The liblouis project attempts to handle incoming feature requests with as much flexibility and speed as possible. We take whatever contributions come in and integrate them into the system. We also fix the occasional (security) bug. We’d like to improve the math support and rewrite the library in Rust, but neither of the maintainers really has that much time to spare for these larger projects.
- http://liblouis.io/
- https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis
- We do not have any funds.
- We expect some money to come in for our efforts spent in a security audit with OSTIF.
- We do not have any ongoing fundraising programs for our project.
- Bert set up Github sponsoring for himself and earns around 20 to 25 Euros a month.
- Aside from paying for the domain name, we don’t really have any expenses.
- If we had any money, we could envision paying for:
- some of the developer effort
- security audits
- license compliance efforts
- help with a migration to Rust
- Yes, we’d most likely be willing to participate, but are not sure exactly what the participation entails.
- No.
- We do not hold any trademarks.
- The name liblouis was coined by the original author John Boyer probably around 2002 when the project was started.
- The domain name registration for
liblouis.orgdates back to 2010-12-27
- We do not have a logo.
No, we are not aware of anyone in our project, individual or company, holding a patent related to liblouis.
- No.
ViewPlus is a manufacturer of braille embossers. In 2002 they had licensed a commercial product to translate text to braille. Since they were not happy with the product, they approached John Boyer in 2004 to write a braille translation software. John Boyer was a well known braille expert and software developer. The initial development was based of BTLTTY[fn:2], the Linux driver for refreshable braille displays. John Boyer negotiated with Dave Mielke, the author of BRLTTY, to be able to license the new project liblouis under the LGPL.
In 2006 ViewPlus engaged John Boyer again to work on what would become liblouisxml, a tool to convert xml into formatted braille.
Soon liblouis was picked up by Linux distributions and was integrated into open source screen readers such as Orca (by Eitan Isaacson, funded by the Mozilla Foundation) and NVDA (by James Teh of NVAccess).
In 2009 Christian Egli at the SBS picked liblouis to replace a legacy system to produce braille books. He soon began to contribute to the documentation and the build scripts.
In 2010 Bert Frees used liblouis to create a plugin for OpenOffice to print documents to a braille embosser and to export documents as braille files.
In 2012 Mesar Hameed started to work with table contributors to incorporate their languages into liblouis. Thanks to him, liblouis gained support for many more languages. He also created a test suite to test tables against braille translations that are known to be correct. This later evolved into the YAML-based test suite as we have it today.
In 2014 when John Boyer wanted to step down, Christian Egli and Bert Frees took over maintenance. They migrated to GitHub and instated a time-based release schedule with four releases a year.
In 2015 Mike Gray of American Printing House for the Blind (APH) provided a major update to liblouis so that it finally supported UEB, the new standard for English braille. This led to the release of liblouis 3.0 in 2016.
In 2017 we re-licensed liblouis from LGPLv3 to LGPLv2.1+ on request from Amazon.
In 2017 Reiner Dolph used emscripten to transpile liblouis to Javascript and managed to create a version of liblouis that runs inside the browser.
In 2021 Mike Gray died and in 2023 John Boyer passed away.
Due to a mishap, we lost the domain liblouis.org in 2023 and had to
migrate to liblouis.io.
At FOSDEM 2023 Bert and Christian had a meeting and decided that the liblouis project deserves a solid legal foundation. That is when they started to look for an umbrella organization to ensure the continuity of the project.
- Bert and Christian are the maintainers and make all the decisions. We sometimes have lengthy discussions but we always find a compromise. We have a long working relationship and resolve issues by consensus. Sometimes we involve the original sponsor in the discussions and ask for his advice.
- We distribute Windows binaries.
- The binaries are built using
mingw, running in standard Debian images inside docker containers. Thus anyone should be able to reproduce those.
- We do not offer consulting of any kind.
- We do not have a SaaS offering.
- Debian
- packaged in “main” (https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/liblouis)
- Ubuntu
- (https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all§ion=all&arch=any&searchon=sourcenames&keywords=liblouis)
- Fedora
- (https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/liblouis)
- Arch
- (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/liblouis-git)
- Guix
- (https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/liblouis/)
- There is an informal agreement between the SBS (Christian’s employer) and Christian that he is allowed to work a few hours per month on liblouis during work hours.
- There is a formal agreement between SBS and Bert Frees, which pays for a maximum 10 hours of work on liblouis per month.
- Formerly, ViewPlus was paying for the domain name. Since 2023 SBS holds the domain name and is paying for it.
- ViewPlus has had several contracts where they paid the original author John Boyer for the creation of liblouis and a companion project liblouisutdml to handle formatting of braille.
- To our knowledge there are no other affiliations.
- Liblouis is a library and does not have a user-facing API. Most real users use liblouis indirectly via a screen reader, or the Android accessibility tools, so it is really hard to come up with an estimate of the user base.
- There are also indirect users who benefit from braille books that were generated with the help of liblouis.
- According to the Debian Popularity contest statistics, liblouis has around 3000 regular (Debian) users[fn:3].
- According to Musée Louis Braille there are six million braille readers around the world[fn:4].
- If we assume that 5% of them benefit from liblouis in some direct or indirect form, we would have 300 000 users.
- John J. Boyer <john.boyer@abilitiessoft.org> from Abilitiessoft Inc., 2002-2014
- Christian Egli <christian.egli@sbs.ch>, SBS, 2009-now
- Bert Frees <bertfrees@gmail.com>, DAISY Consortium (www.daisy.org), 2012-now
- Mesar Hameed <mesar.hameed@gmail.com>, University of Bath, 2012-2016
- Bue Vester-Andersen <bue@vester-andersen.dk>, LVI Danmark, 2014-now
- Dave Mielke <dave@mielke.cc>, BRLTTY, 2017-2019
- Davy Kager <mail@davykager.nl>, Dedicon, 2015-2019
- Eitan Isaacson <eitan@ascender.com>, Mozilla, 2009
- James Teh <jamie@jantrid.net>, NV Access, 2009-2017
- Mike Gray <mgray@aph.org>, American Printing House for the Blind, 2015-2019
- Reiner Dolp <hallo@reinerdolp.com>, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2017
- see also https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/blob/master/AUTHORS
- In 2023 due to a mishap the domain
liblouis.orgexpired and was acquired by a domain squatter. We offered to buy it back but got no response. So we had to migrate toliblouis.io. - In 2014 Amazon approached us about changing the license from LGPLv3 to LGPLv2.1. They wanted to use liblouis in their Kindle devices. We agreed and contacted all contributors. All library contributors agreed and also the majority of the table contributors. So liblouis is mostly LGPLv2.1. A handful of tables remain LGPLv3 as we could not reach the respective authors (see [fn:5]).
- The original author of liblouis, John J. Boyer, passed away at the beginning of 2023.
[fn:2] https://brltty.app/ [fn:1] https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/wiki/Products-that-use-Liblouis
[fn:3] https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=liblouis
[fn:4] https://museelouisbraille.com/en/le-braille-aujourd-hui
[fn:5] https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/issues/26