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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.'"
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.