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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.'"
Maybe I am missing something but how are companies evil? Are we saying that the federal business license that IBM holds is evil? If so would they no longer be evil if all of the employees and shareholders went off and started another company doing exactly the same thing under a different license? Or is it that IBM's employees are evil as a whole? I've heard this claim about EA and it didn't make any sense there either. You could argue that some of IBM's business practices are unethical but does that translate into evil? And who is keeping track of the good and evil score? I would be inclined to mark any donation to free software (ie. eclipse) as a good action. Why don't we start looking at these things objectively. All companies have the same objective: make the owners/shareholders profitable. If you don't like the way they do that, then don't buy their products or do any work for them. Beyond that, maligning an entire organization does nothing more the expose your infantile understanding of group dynamics and cast aspersions on the character of individuals you know nothing about. Calling IBM evil is like calling guns(hammers/chainsaws/cars/insert your favorite tool here) evil. You can't attribute malicious intent/philosophy to objects. Only people can have those qualities.
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.
Bear in mind that it's probably fairly old code.
I daresay IBM were granted sublicensing rights at a time when Microsoft hadn't even considered that such a license as the GPL could exist, let alone be in any sort of common use. I bet you anything you like they wouldn't license code in such a way today.
IBM is lawyer central. I'm sure they'll be fine.
I am blind (you insensitive clod). And I'd wager I'm not the only slashdot reader who is. I mean, if the comments on Slashdot are to be believed, then the Slashdot editors alone must have a large fraction of blind members, not to mention all the Slashdot moderators....
Yet, I still don't really care about the article. Then again, I only skimmed through it, like any other card-carrying Slashdot member. But from what I can tell, it's a cross-platform API for adding accessibility to various programs....
I'd much rather use a seperate accessibility program that just works with all other programs, instead of trying to pick out a word processor and a browser that supports screen reading capabilities. Then I don't have to configure and set up each program I use for accessibility, nor do I have to worry about developers forgetting something (q.v: CAPCHAS)
So, the fact that [insert favorite software title here] supports accessibility doesn't really matter to me. When they have a OS independent, free, open source, and stable version of something like this, then I might pay attention.
-Aluion, Posting as anonymous because I've already moderated this discussion. Yes, I realise the irony.
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