Slashdot Mirror
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).
Doesn't Windows 7 offer excellent accessibility options??
Love me or leave me. Hey, where's everybody going?
Maybe the folks at Oracle use KDE.
No, I think Oracle is just wise enough to see GNOME for what it is today: a failure.
It really doesn't have much going for it. It's a fucking dependency hell, with even a basic GNOME installation requiring the compilation of over 60 separate packages. Sure, there are various scripts to help with this, but it's still a huge hassle dealing with this many dependencies, even when automated.
It's also built upon a lousy toolkit. GTK+ is a has-been, and is absolutely pathetic compared to a modern toolkit like Qt. GTK+ has a terrible API (modelled on Motif!), not to mention a slow implementation. Their GObject "object system" is absolutely terrible. They could have at least used Objective-C, if they didn't want to use C++.
The development of GNOME itself has stagnated over the past couple of years. Sure, GNOME 3 is supposed to be released in September, but what we've seen so far has been very immature. If people felt that KDE 4 was released too early, GNOME 3 will be released while it's basically at the embryonic phase of its development. Oracle has realized this, and it's not surprising that they're washing their hands of it.
If it weren't for GNOME being the default desktop of Ubuntu and Fedora (which is more a fluke of history), it would be long forgotten by now. KDE and XFCE are where the real innovation is happening these days, and the remnants of the GNOME community can't do a thing about it. GNOME is a project that is, for all intents and purposes, obsolete.