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IBM Beats Microsoft Over the Head With Their Own Code

Posted by Zonk on from the ow-that-if-statement-hurts dept.

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.'"

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. sensational headlines by pembo13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:sensational headlines by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's the bizarro-slashdot. Interesting stories. Expertly-edited summaries. Insightful and intelligent discussion.

  2. Wow! by Otter · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...
  3. The article it wrong; IBM work is not from MS IP by peterkorn · · Score: 5, Informative
    IAccessible2 is an extension to IAccessible, the core accessible object in Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA). It supplements the MS-defined information with a ton of stuff that is missing and is needed to provide real support for assistive technologies (vs. the very limited job Microsoft did). IAccessible2 is actually a port of the GNOME Accessibility API that Sun developed and brought to the GNOME community (see ATK and AT-SPI from the GNOME SVN repository). That was in turn derived from the Java Accessibility API, of which I am a co-author.

    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.