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).

Comments

Capitalism at work...

[VendettaMF]

Surely this does not come as a surprise to anyone?

Oracle, who have deliberately lessened the abilities of their own products (from a reasonably solid database system 10 years ago to a steaming turd now) in order to sell more licenses to do the same amount of work will continue to cut anything that is not immediately profitable.

Anything that Sun pursued on moral or ethical grounds, and anything that shows "future promise" will be axed as soon as they spot it.

As well as anything that could potentially compete with their more expensive in-house crap.

People have been worrying about MySQL. They have been right to worry. However, as a corporation, Oracle can and will have all relevant American laws re-written/re-interpreted as necessary to see all commercial deployment of MySQL in the USA dead within two years.

Re:Oracle DB

[Chris Lawrence]

It's not any one thing. It's lots of little things. Lots of flexibility and subtlety with SQL statements. Some obscure functions you wouldn't find anywhere else. More powerful and intricate subqueries and triggers. Extreme flexibility in modifying existing tables and other data structures live. An almost insane level of customizability (any good book on Oracle spends half the book talking about installation.) Now it's not perfect, they still don't have a proper time/date format (time_t anyone??), making date calculations across timezones and taking daylight savings into account a real pain.

Granted, most people don't need this stuff. PostgreSQL is good enough for most roles. The complexity versus reward ratio might not work out for a lot of things anymore, nevermind the cost. I'm out of the game now, so I don't know what the latest stuff does, but they were definitely ahead of the pack for a long time. But they're kind of just going on inertia now. They don't even define themselves as a database company anymore, though that's the only really good product they have. I probably wouldn't buy it today, but I have some fond memories, and it really helped me to build some great stuff.

Re:Some perspective

[WaywardGeek]

It turns out that one of the people Oracle fired is effectively the Linus Torvald of Linux accessibility. He architected it, and wrote a ton of it. It's like firing Linux, and complaining that after all, it's only one guy.

As for OpenOffice accessibility, kiss it goodbye on Linux. Without Willie or a team of several guys to replace him, it will slowly degrade in to unusablity.

I'm 100% with you on the other guys hiring Willie. My preference would be Canonical (Ubuntu), but RedHat would be a decent fit, and I could even live with Novell. Maybe they could start working off the evil taint.