Slashdot Mirror
IBM Beats Microsoft Over the Head With Their Own Code
bednarz writes "IBM has added a twist to its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology. IBM's iAccessible2, code-named Project Missouri, is a specification for technology used to help the visually impaired interact with Open Document Format (ODF)-compliant applications and was developed in part using Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA). 'When the specification was donated to the Linux Foundation, Oracle, Sun, and SAP committed to help with future development. Mozilla is committed to incorporating it into its Firefox browser, and vendors GW Micro and Freedom Scientific will also use it in their own screen reader products. In addition, Project Missouri has won accolades from the American Association of People with Disabilities, the American Foundation for the Blind, and the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science.'"
I don't know where "beats Microsoft over the head" comes in. IBM is donating Microsoft-developed code that empowers the blind to use software better.
Gee, I'm sure MS doesn't want that kind of bad PR...
Next up: Bill Gates donates large sums to the UN to help with immunizations! Oh, MS! BURRRNN!
These sensational headlines are kinda getting boring.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
This is now even more promising: a Microsoft spec, Lotus Notes code and a Brooksian army of offshored developers! It's hard to imagine how this couldn't work!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Perhaps I read this wrong, but IBM wrote some code using Microsoft technology (IP) then plan to fuse it with the OO source tree? Does this ring a bell for anyone? Isn't this what MS has been complaining about? Not trying to troll, but this sounds odd. Maybe IBM wrote the underlying code that was later used by MS in their product, in that case this is a wonderful donation. Though the way it's worded doesnt sound right.
Which dog do you root for in this fight? I don't know about you, but IBM is not far behind Microsoft in the world of evil corporations. Which one is worse?
Microsoft has made no commitment to follow any standard. Including the standards that they developed and supported only in their products. Despite all the effort it put into OOXML ratification, it really made no commitment to implement it fully or support it in the next version. They own 90% of the market and not allowing anyone else to interoperate with them is the clear unambiguous goal for them. So what if IBM posts some accessibility code and donates it? In the next version the accessibility API & GUI will completely change in Windows and so all this code and the effort by others to follow the standards will be thwarted. Sorry to be a cynic, but as long as customers confuse interoperability with Microsoft compatibility there is no way others can win. Customers flock to Microsoft. May be blindly. May be short-sightedly. May be against their own interest. But as long as they do, all we can do is to wring our hands in despair.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
All the improvements are very welcomed especially when you take into account the price of Open Office. How will Microsoft, at some point (or even now), justify the huge price tag of MS Office?
I'm going to fucking kill the blind!!!!!!!!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I hope IBM they made VERY sure that Microsoft can't come after them for using MS technology, otherwise it could be giving MS what they want in that it geves them an excuse to attack and try to close down OpenOffice.
I wage that nobody cares. In fact I could probably make a blind joke or two and still manage to not offend the fair majority of people here.
Missouri is the "Show Me" state, hence the project name. Missouri is in that vast wasteland between LA and New York City. ;)
http://www.state.mo.us/
It'll be a slow transition, but in my experience, companies are beginning to realize what ugly hacks a lot of their excel solutions really are and are moving to more solid server-side databases and apps. It's happening very slowly, but excel is really falling out of favor for its "applications."
The ugliest macro-infested & crosslinked to multiple workbooks ExHell files I've seen ultimately always get tossed out once they break. More often than not, whoever created it has long since left, crucial files have gone missing and it's nearly impossible to tell what kind of crack they were smoking when they put the thing together in the first place and it's amazing the beast ever worked at all.
It scans the document for an embedded binary accessibility control. If it finds it, it asks the OS for full privs (so that it can run faster and have "full accessibility functionality") and then executes it.
I think 'poking them in the eye' would be a better analogy. Anyhoo, these kind of enabling technologies is required for Federal use.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You've just hit on my current hell.
Only this hell is a Labview Excel hell when it should be a Labview => Matlab => Database hell.
These men that created this files are my friends. I've worked with them for over 15 years. I probably was in the room smoking the same crack.
I still don't know why in the fuck we decided to do what we did and I now hate everyone involved.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I guess IBM didn't learn their lesson in donating questionably patented code to the open source community after the SCO incident, or they really like playing the wolf in sheep's clothing card against companies that deserve the wrath of pulling the IP card. It should be interesting to see what happens with this since Microsoft wouldn't really be able to attack by proxy in the event they decide to take action.
in the Microsoft platform that many people never see or think about. We end up making extensive use of them for automated testing, actually.
It turns out that the same sort of API that makes it easier to build accessible products, whereby you can ask any UI element about its current visibility, text, or whatever, is also good for writing test automation. When you couple that with the ability to send windows events or messages to an arbitrary control, now you've got something foundational for doing automated UI testing in a pretty robust way.
Internally we work pretty hard on accessibility features because they're great for enabling users with different adaptive needs, they're required to sell to many government offices, and because they're excellent for our internal testing efforts.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
More specifically, the IAccessible2 header files are copied almost directly from the OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API - the IAccessible2 headers contain a Sun copyright! See http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20070910 and http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20061214 for more on this.
Well, MS Office supports ODF.
Actually, they actually helped create it, if my memory serves me right.
So what's the problem, then? MS Office sucking compared to the competition? ;)
Ignore this signature. By order.
Or maybe, just maybe, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about?
They can be found at http://accessibility.freestandards.org/a11yspecs/ia2/api/. From a quick look, it appears that the interfaces are under the GPL. Would this mean that any implementation that used these interfaces would have to be GPL? Surely you can't implement an interface without including the source code for the interface specification. For me, this would almost mean that any interface should be published under an MIT or BSD license, even if your want your implementation to be under a GPL. Then you would maximize sharing of the interface, while protecting your code that actually implements the interfaces. Am I missing something here?
Think global, act loco
Shouldn't respond to trolls, bit someone might actually believe you.
>> Office is WIDELY used, and it *is* the standard.
That's a funny definition of "standard". I guess I get it. Kinda like AOL is "the standard", this WWW thing is just a fad.
>> but in ANY financial institution, Excel is a
>> *requirement*
Can I see your sources? Or is that proprietary info.? Do I need to sign an NDA first?
>> without having to 'convert' thousands of
>> spreadsheets they have worked so tirelessly on.
Gosh, I can see why open formats are so bad now, and why they limit your choice of applications.
And why would anyone ever want to 'convert'? Isn't that what those open source heathens are always trying to get everyone to do? Only people who are wrong in the first place need to convert. Good folk like you and me are 100% right all the time, so we never need to convert to ANYTHING.
By the way, what format did those financial institutions use before Excel? It was a painless transition, no? I mean, any application they used back then could easily export 100%-compatible Excel documents, because "Excel" IS a standard. They wouldn't have switched to it in the first place if it wasn't standard, obviously. You know, being important financial institutions, they NEVER screw up.
Good thing those spreadsheets they enter aren't anything important, like financial data. Good thing we can count on the fact that we can read them 20 years from now. I mean, what if someday we actually DID start entering something important, like...I don't know...financial data, maybe? I can see why using the STANDARD is so important.
>> Maybe next format war, they can win... this one
>> they won't.
Good thing we aren't using open standards, because then there'd be no wars. Everyone loves wars!
Sorry about that first remark, I didn't think you were serious. You have won me over. I would love to have your children. Of course, we'll need an NDA first.
You're right.
Sarcastic but right.
Too bad you posted anon: your post needs a higher mod than zero to stay visible in the thread.
if an API spec is GPL'ed then wouldn't mean that if you use the spec:
...
you can change it and use that changed version for internal uses without giving those changes back
you can change it but if you provide that to others, you must provide the "source"/spec to those who ask
Just thinking that the GPL is applied to the document and in this case, it's an API spec, not implementation source code.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
While I'm not disabled I'd still like to say thank you for all your efforts in this area.
Ok, cool. I'm still confused. IBM is contributing code it got from open office to ... open office? That seems like it should have been required in the first place. I don't know what Sun would have done without IBM donating its own code back to it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This is precisely why the license for OOo changed to LGPL (which happened just prior to OOo 2.0). Under the previous license, code did not need to be contributed back (and the OOo derived functionality in IBM's Lotus Notes 8 came from OOo 1.9.x). The big news in the IBM announcement is that IBM is returning to the community from whence it forked OOo, and contributing back (many? most? all) of their changes. One thing that is being highlighted (and discussed in this thread and erroneously attributed to a Microsoft original source) is that among their first contributions back is the newly created by them Windows edition of the accessibility work that they derived from OOo.
This is all political maneuvering on IBM's part.
Most of the "code" being donated is simply proof-of-concept stuff, demos / samples, or the Peter Korn self-promotion dog-and-pony-show you can see at any assistive technology forum for the past few years.
And the assistive technology companies agreeing to work on this is simply political positioning too. Until you see actual software for sale based on this code, this is meaningless.
Finally, FWIW, most assistive technologies don't use either this OR MSAA as their main API set. The majority of their code bases are a spaghetti code stack of hacks that they've carried around for years, because they can always threaten Microsoft with "you're screwing the blind!" if Microsoft doesn't let them access Windows / Microsoft apps exactly the way they want to.
Microsoft hasn't been a great friend to the blind, hasn't since the days of DOS. But IBM isn't really all too clever or helpful here either.
There's nothing to see here. Move along.
MS deliberately didn't include ODF support out of the box, as that would open an avenue to the loss of the monopoly on the formats. That's never in the best interests of Microsoft according to MS heirarchy.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
I totally share your thoughts on the matter. I get that funny feeling that whole that IBM's continuing support for FOSS is actually a slow but persistent, relentless revenge pursuit on Microsoft for OS/2 - NT backstab. It's almost like reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" over again. Whenever Microsoft tries to regroup and linger on some resistance point, its nemesis IBM steps in "for the people" and helps crush it... like a mother ship providing logistic and heavy artillery support to a fighter fleet.
I wonder what will happen with FOSS (or at least with their "friendship") once IBM & Allies do out with Microsoft, bury it and finish dancing on its grave? I hope it will be a better world, although I am not sure that the interests will remain aligned like they are today. It will critically depend on ability of big corporations (IBM, Sun) to succeed commercially on OSS model. The way I see it, they will shift value into hardware and it will produce forces that act to tear market by introducing incompatibilities and (patentable) hardware features which favor "their" open-sourced software.
The battle will be fought to dominate, instead of owning, major projects and dictate their development path favorably. It is analogous to neocolonial vs. colonial rule over production of critical resources. Once "British Empire" of IT, Microsoft, is off the stage, new corporate overlords will "influence" and shape the landscape to suit their own products best. It is even possible that Microsoft will take the same path at certain point in time when outcome becomes apparent and end of empire imminent. They are already diversifying, experimenting with OSS (and acquiring some), inventing hardware devices/UIs... I guess they are not in for an epic Great Last Stand.
As soon as I read this, I knew... without even looking... that this had to be an article submitted by Zonk. The correspondence of screwed-up articles to Zonk submittals has got to be close to 1:1.
All your sig are belong to us.
n/t