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Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).
Oracle has a solid core DB engine. It dates back to the seventies, but it has evolved and it's still really good. Everything built around it is pretty much crap. But people buy from Oracle for the DB engine, then get stuck buying a lot of other super-expensive, bad quality software. I love PostgreSQL, and it's getting better every day, but there's still some stuff the core Oracle engine did ten years ago you can't get anywhere else.
People have been worrying about MySQL. They have been right to worry.
Its funny. With all the hubbub surrounding MySQL, hardly anyone has even bothered asking what's going to happen to OpenOffice.org.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Because now Willie has to get a job doing something else, working many hours a week on another task that ISN'T this one. So he's left doing this work as a side-project, which I imagine doesn't leave a lot of room for serious work.