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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.'"
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.
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?
While I can guess what your complaints against Microsoft would be, I am unsure about what you don't like about IBM. What is it about IBM that makes them an evil corporation? Are your complaints current or only concerning past transgressions?
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/
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.
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.
IBM offshored nearly all of their staff. That is enough for me.
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.
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.
Well, IBM has surely been seriously harmed by the SCO incident. As you can see, IBM has become a penny stock company, they are ridiculed across Slashdot... they're finished.
The kind of lawyers IBM has, I'd be amazed to watch MS try and take them on. I'd even make popcorn. (Especially since I'm quite certain that, having the kind of lawyers they have, they'd made pretty sure they were in the clear beforehand.)
Ignore this signature. By order.
Well, until now, there is no questionable code donated to Linux by IBM. But that isn't a reason to avoid suing, is it? Also, please, take a look at the diference beteween patents and copyrights.
Now, that code was created on a partneship between IBM and Microsoft, so, both of them probably have the rights of it. Diferently from Microsoft's, FOSS never had a big incident of "misplaced" code or patent violation, so we have no reason not to trust our partners.
Rethinking email
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
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.
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.
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.