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

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

This post is for GNAA

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

The Greater Need for Accelerating Accessibility?

Re:First Post

[Helen Keller]

GnnnnclodMEH!

There is still hope

[Anonymous Coward]

The beautiful thing about Gnome is that it is an open source project that anyone can contribute to. Also, you can learn to type with your nose and maybe your foot (to operate the shift key) so you can contribute code to the project that way

Re:There is still hope

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:There is still hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll. But in reality, any desktop based on the archaic X11 system will fester away in total obscurity on engineering workstations and in virgins' basements. Eventually the themes will look tastelessly out of date, and even the most arduous zealots won't be able to deny the obsolesce caused by the death of investment into the failed project of the Linux desktop.

In ten years its easy to imagine that something like Android might dominate whatever is left of the *nix desktop market.

Re:There is still hope

[eno2001]

So I haven't been around here for a while. Not because I don't like Slashdot, but because it's largely become a ghost town in terms of new stories thanks to the cesspool known as Digg. Having been involved in on-line communities since the late 80s (Cleveland Freenet is dead. LONG LIVE the Cleveland Freenet!) I can say that this was predictable. What I didn't predict is that mindless and uncreative trolls such as yourself would still be involved in the Gnome vs. KDE or KDE vs. Gnome wars. It's like those stories you hear about people finding Japanese soldiers a decade or two later on some uncharted island who are still fighting WW II. Give it a rest. Go home.

Both environments have their uses from the end-user perspective. Gnome definitely won on claiming the minds of developers. Which of the two has more USEFUL software these days? I'll give you a hint, it doesn't try to ape Windows. That said, which development platform caters to more fringe users (not pejorative in the least because I'm one of them) with much more specific uses than grandma? I'll give you another hint, its developers can't seem to come up with creative names so they preface everything with a K or a Q.

In a way I feel pity for you. You would have engaged a lot of people back in the day. But today, you're kind of like the crazy old uncle who gets drunk at family parties and starts feeling up his nieces: sad and very very wrong. Pack it in soldier. The world has moved on.

TT

Re:There is still hope

[LWATCDR]

There are C++ bindings for GTK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtkmm
Also the GTK library is used in a large number of popular programs.
I have to say that I just don't find KDE desktop as useful and Gnome.
KDE IMHO is just way to fiddly while the Gnome desktop really does just seem to work.
To me people are really forgetting exactly what a desktop is for. It is to launch applications and to manage files.
When it get to that level KDE just tries to do to much and is to complex.
Oh and I am not a low end user I just understand that is a lot harder to make a good simple UI than it is to make complex UI.

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, the Gnome logo is a foot. Just type with you feet and it's alright!

XD

KDE rejoices?

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but this is just more fuel to the fire of GNOME vs KDE flamewars.

Retards

[Anonymous Coward]

Retards use Linux? Who knew...

Re:Retards

[binarylarry]

No, retards currently use Windows, it has great accessibility support.

This about making sure retards can use Linux in the future.

Re:Retards

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many witty and or generally degrading comments i could make about both the intellectually disabled and windows users.

I have a free pass given my own share of intellectual show stoppers (of the social variety if you must know), i however choose not to exercise it.

Re:Retards

[Anonymous Coward]

both the intellectually disabled and windows users.

both? and?

Re:Retards

[pookemon]

Do you now. Interesting.

Re:Retards

[chewthreetimes]

I must commend ./ for its awesome a11y features, which allow even the likes of these to contribute.

Use Windows 7

[benxx]

Doesn't Windows 7 offer excellent accessibility options??

Re:Use Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing about the modding is that if this was a story about Windows dropping commitment to accessibility and someone said "use Linux" it would be modded +5 Insightful.

Re:Use Windows 7

[delinear]

Well, it's not that straightforward - moral considerations aside there is a not inconsiderable (particularly if your disability means you aren't able to work) cost associated with a move to Windows from Linux which obviously doesn't exist when the situation is reversed, so to many people it would be more applicable.

Re:Use Windows 7

[squiggly12]

Of course there isn't a cost (going the reverse route) unless you count time. Could someone with a disability no matter what it is install a *nix version in under an hour by themselves?
Regardless, what kind of disability are you talking about?

*Physically disabled*

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You're not mentally disabled (I hope). The code is available for you to modify and extend as you please. What's with all the bellyaching?

This is the biggest problem with the OSS community. There are a whole lot of people who want something for nothing, and the way the system works does nothing to encourage people to participate in the hard part.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[wizardforce]

This has absolutely nothing to do with "wanting something for nothing." The more people working on accessibility, the quicker the work gets done. Naturally the reduction of contributers would be viewed as a bad thing by the OSS community.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Chris Lawrence]

In general, you're right. You want a feature in OSS, and no one is doing it? Do it yourself. Accessibility falls into a different category. You *could* say, sorry you weren't born with sight, try again next life. But that wouldn't be a very nice thing to say. We have two main commercial operating systems, Mac OS X, and Windows. So, let's say both companies decide accessibility doesn't matter, just screw it. Are people with disabilities supposed to just lie down and take it? I would hope we've evolved past that.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Romancer]

"Oracle is committed to creating accessible technologies and products that enhance the overall workplace environment and contribute to the productivity of our employees, our customers, and our customers' customers."
--Safra Catz, President and CFO, Oracle

For many reasons--legal, business, and ethical--Oracle recognizes the need for our applications, and our customers' and partners' products built with our tools, to be usable by the disabled community.

So not really "bellyaching", more of a "holding a company to the claims they make."

A lot of people were worried what would happen to the support of these programs when the buyout was announced. Almost as if they were part of a community that used the products and hoped that the support they have given the company wasn't going to result in them being abandoned after the merger.

I'm Joanie. By day, I'm an assistive technology specialist working with individuals who are blind or visually impaired. By night, weekend, and holiday for almost four years now, I've been a GNOME community contributor working primarily on the Orca screen reader, a project led by Sun's Accessibility Program Office.

---The author of the article you didn't read.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[RMS Eats Toejam]

Yes, actually it does. Though to be more specific, you want the work done faster for nothing. Not going to happen.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not lie down and take it. But I'd be happy if Microsoft ditched the features that I don't only don't need, but actively get in my way, and all y'all paid your own way to accessibility instead of riding on my pocketbook.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Chris Lawrence]

Yeah, let's stop paying for a public police force. If you can't afford to pay protection, you deserve what you get.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[RMS Eats Toejam]

Accessibility falls into a different category. You *could* say, sorry you weren't born with sight, try again next life. But that wouldn't be a very nice thing to say.

Except it's the very people with disabilities who often work toward finding the solutions they need. Just ask Louis Braille.

Are people with disabilities supposed to just lie down and take it? I would hope we've evolved past that.

No, but they also don't need you to tell them what to take or not take. People with disabilities are just as capable as anyone else to solve their own problems without your concern, interference, or instructions.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[exomondo]

In general, you're right. You want a feature in OSS, and no one is doing it? Do it yourself.

And if you can't do it yourself and can't afford to pay someone to do it for you then bad luck, that's the free software way! Yay freedom!

Re:*Physically disabled*

[WaywardGeek]

A lot of the fear in blind-linux land isn't because Oracle fired two people, but because they fired Willie Walker. So far as I can tell from all the accessibility code I've read, Willie roughly plays the same role for open-source accessibility that Linus Torvalds plays for Linux. It's as if someone bought the company Linus works for, and said, "This guy is overpaid. Let's save some money."

I'm slowly losing my own vision, but while I can still use inaccessible software, I'm hacking like crazy in my free time to improve the things in Linux land. So, I've read a lot of code, and Willie's name is all over the place. The most important centerpiece of Linux accessibility is the Orca screen reader for the Gnome desktop. Who do you think was in charge of both Orca and Gnome accessibility? Willie, and for damned good reasons.

For guys like me who write code on Linux boxes for a living, Willie's departure from Sun is scary as hell.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

A public police force benefits everybody except criminals. Accessibility options only benefit a tiny minority.

Perhaps a better comparison would be "Yeah, let's stop paying for public education. If you can't afford to pay for school, you deserve what you get." Which I agree with.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[swordgeek]

"Are people with disabilities supposed to just lie down and take it?"

Well in the Open Source world, that's exactly what EVERYONE who isn't capable or willing to fix their problems themselves is supposed to do.

Don't like it? Fix it, hire someone to fix it, or shut the hell up. This is almost always (still!) promoted as a positive feature, but in reality is a significant disadvantage.

Sorry, but the disabled community gets no special treatment on this issue.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

Accessibility options only benefit a tiny minority.

Obviously you plan on getting yourself killed before you get old. You certainly are dumb enough to succeed.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[exomondo]

>

Perhaps a better comparison would be "Yeah, let's stop paying for public education. If you can't afford to pay for school, you deserve what you get." Which I agree with.

Hence the 'posted by Anonymous Coward'. Don't feed the troll.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[wizardforce]

You're education was either 1) public or 2) paid by mommy and daddy. Enough with the plutocratic fuck the poor bullshit.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[dimeglio]

Sad indeed but they need to maintain products accessible as they are becoming regulated for government purchases and soon, if not already, will be required by large corporations for bidding on commercial tenders. Sun wants a nice, then fine but hopefully this is only a set-back and not a complete withdrawal.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why free software is superior to commercial software!

Re:*Physically disabled*

[WaywardGeek]

Let me tell you, you're right that the blind do take control and solve the problem themselves. If you lost your sight and hearing, and you were a big Linux hacker, what would you do? Buy a Braille display, slap some low-level code to drive it into the kernel to read the console, and you're off coding! That project is called "speakup", and it's great for blind-deaf programmers, and not bad at all for the blind who can hear. What if you're a really good emacs hacker who loses your vision? What do you do? Rewrite the entire desktop environment based on talking emacs? That project is called emacspeak, and many consider it the most productive environment for blind programmers with good hearing.

What if you want access to all those great Gnome applications like FireFox and OpenOffice? Now, you're at the mercy of the big Linux distros, because it involves 100 binary packages that the distro ships to all take part. That's where you need a guy like Willie Walker, who has the clout at all the major distros to set the direction for the entire linux accessibility community. That's the guy Oracle fired. That's the code which may fall apart, and the blind will not be able to fix it, not unless they find a new Willie Walker.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate asking this - but would it be possible for the people in need of this kind of software to create a facebook page and ask for donations. At @$250 per person, you need just 400 to hit the magic $100K number. I would happily donate for this cause, and I think a lot of others would too.

While working on such issues is very important. it is hard for companies to keep employees just cos they are working on something which is not directly productive to a company ( or convince google .. intel or someone else to fund your 'accessiblity' program.)

My sympathies to you, and I look forward to hearing that you have a facebook page for Willie Walker - and that you raise a lot of money. I look forward to dontating.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 troll by nature. Probably some birther teabagger too.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[war4peace]

I don't understand one thing: what stops Willie from continuing his work? Did Oracle fire him and take his brains away? Did he leave his knowledge in Oracle's courtyard and start playing Minesweeper for the rest of his life?
Gnome Accessibility code is Open Source AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong please. Therefore, anyone can continue doing that, including the oh-so-famous Willie. If a company decides there's no gain involved in keeping someone, the company will let the guy go. Furthermore, if Willie is as famous as you state, other companies should fight over him like crazy.
Ergo: Either Willie ain't that good or he was doing what he was doing solely for money. And yes, if no passion was involved, I would be scared as well. Otherwise, just wait and see.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[ziggygushi]

As a Legally Blind It Pro I'm with you. And here's something a lot of people are missing on this discussion. Linux or what ever oracle is pushing selling is going no-where without accessibility. Because I'd imagine some of the first places to pick it up would be the government and the Feds can't touch it if it doesn't have accessibility features.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the code which may fall apart, and the blind will not be able to fix it, not unless they find a new Willie Walker.

He's not dead you know... He's just not drawing a paycheck from Oracle anymore.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

90+ percent of the blind just use Windows, and are fairly happy with it. The best software, JAWs, ain't cheap at > $1000 per year, but that's the price of top-notch closed-source assessibility software.

But Linux isn't for Average Joe. It's for hackers like a lot of us here on slashdot. We do work together and individually like crazy to make Linux a great platform for the blind and visually impaired. There are multipl very successful applications written primarily by a single blind author. Linux is where a blind hacker can take control of his own life, and get a well paying job as a programmer.

Still, Linux didn't get to where it is because of a bunch of hackers with spare time. The big pieces are all funded. Think OpenOffice would continue improving with no paid developers? From the Gnome desktop to Firefox to Skype, someone got paid to write or port the major apps.

The core accessibility of Gnome using a screen reader is too big a job for any one person. It takes a community leader and a hell of a coder, someone paid to do it full time. That person was Willie, until Oracle laid him off. I'm a fair hacker myself, but I'm very very concerned... All those great Gnome apps could become useless to the blind within a few years, and there's just too much for a hacker to fix in spare time.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Chris Lawrence]

Great reply. I remember back in the days of BBSes. Making add-ons for the blind was relatively easy then, since everything was text based. Hell, with a 300 baud modem, the software could probably speak the text faster than it would show up. :) Everything is much more complicated now, and you can't expect one person to just throw something together to solve the problem.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[BrokenHalo]

Accessibility options only benefit a tiny minority... If you can't afford to pay for school, you deserve what you get." Which I agree with.

What a nasty, creepy little attitude you have. Yuck.

In fact, given the over-the-top troll quotient I've seen in this thread, I'm betting the OP might be regretting having having taken the trouble to submit it. I'm out of here.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[kai_hiwatari]

If you cannot earn from your passion, you tend to shift your passion somewhere.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[JorDan Clock]

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.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[exomondo]

I wouldn't say either is overall 'superior'. Proprietary software developers are more likely to have a vested interest in developing accessible software and someone is accountable. The free software way is that if you need it you either pay someone to do it or have to learn how and find time to do it yourself, if you can't do either then bad luck you don't get access and there is also not always someone accountable for non-compliance with ADA/DDA.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[ashridah]

Actually, since we use the same accessibility controls to test software, they don't benefit a minority. Sorry, but without them, we'd just end up recreating them to do what they provide, except it'd be far less standardized into one API.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

Willie Walker, is that you?

Is this me?

Re:*Physically disabled*

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem then is the high-bus-factor that open source accessibility seems to have.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[msclrhd]

Quoting from a comment I made on the ostatic blog:

"""
Few companies realise the benefits of accessibility. If your product is accessible, you can take advantage of that API to perform tests on the GUI -- that is, driving the GUI through the accessibility layer.

Being accessible means respecting the users colour scheme preferences, fonts and other system settings. This makes the application fit better into the users preferences. This does not just affect accessibility -- try using most applications with a black window background and white text (some applications ignore the text colour and render text black!).

Being accessible also means using keyboard shortcuts that fit with the system and being able to use the application without using a mouse. While some applications (like drawing applications) will require mouse or a tablet to draw with, having the application be drivable through the keyboard means that it is faster to use for the people who know those key sequences (e.g. it is faster to press Ctrl+O to open a file than to move the mouse to the menu/toolbar option for it).
"""

Also, I use text-to-speech software (accessibility) to listen to stories. I am not (yet) blind, I just find it easier. I also use that software to help with proofreading.

And, if I am in a terminal, without access to an X11 server, I can use links to browse the web (the part that supports accessibility, that is).

Allowing a program to be used through a command-line API as well as a GUI also helps with accessibility (a blind user can use it through a command shell, or Braille TTY), while it also makes scripting easier for admins or power users.

Using plain-text configuration files makes it easier to correct and fix issues, or just edit by hand, while it helps with accessibility for the same reason.

So, no... accessibility doesn't only benefit a tiny minority, it is just that people are not usually aware of it.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[delinear]

Like all good trolls, GP ignores frivolous things like "facts" in order to hide the huge flaws in their opinion.

For one thing the disability rate in most nations is pretty standardised at between 10-20% of the population. In the UK, 18.6%, or almost one in five people have a disability. Hardly a "tiny minority" by any means. 40% of the UK population will be aged 45+ this year, the largest number of people in work is in the 45-65 age group and 33% of people aged 50+ have a disability.

These tools help a massive number of people to be productive and contribute to society instead of doing nothing and being a drain on society, the pretty minimal costs associated with accessibility tools is far outweighed by the benefit currently delivered. Maybe GP would prefer to get his software a little cheaper but have a huge tax rise to pay for a big chunk of the population to be out of work needlessly, but to me that thinking is flawed.

On top of that, the disabled sector has huge buying power, around £50b annually which they are more inclined to spend on products which benefit them (for instance, they make up the largest sector of online spending because of the direct accessibility benefits it offers). The success of the internet and ecommerce, which benefits all of us regardless of ability, is in no small part thanks to the contributions of the "tiny minority" GP advocates ignoring.

Then of course there are huge usability benefits that everyone can enjoy which are driven by accessibility. Being able to resize a font that some designer decided would look cool rendered microscopically is the first one that springs to mind, then there are audio books, originally invented to give blind users access to books but now widely used by people who are perhaps driving or working out or just prefer to relax and listen to their favourite book after a long day. There are many other examples. The reasoning behind a feature may be to allow access to users that would otherwise be shut out, but that doesn't mean those same features can't make all of our lives just a little bit easier.

For me this is a big issue, working in web development, accessibility is so deeply intertwined with usability and search engine optimisation (white hat optimisation, that is, presenting relevant data in a format that is easily read by a machine benefits users with screen readers who access that information in the same way) that I can't even imagine not building it in at the root of a project now.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[delinear]

At the risk of sounding hippie, it seems to me that the free software movement should be about inclusion and enabling access to all. I was under the impression that the free software way was about the betterment of mankind by providing everyone tools they can use without restriction, and it turns out all along it's actually just about satisfying your own needs and screw everyone else?

Re:*Physically disabled*

[indiechild]

Which jackass is modding all the responses down?

Re:*Physically disabled*

[exomondo]

and it turns out all along it's actually just about satisfying your own needs and screw everyone else?

Well its about everyone satisfying your own needs and contributing these back to the community. So if no-one with the ability to develop a solution that satisfies your needs has done so you are in a tight spot. It gives the 'freedom' to do whatever you want, but you still need someone to actually 'do' it.

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:Capitalism at work...

[wizardforce]

It might not have been a surprise but it is very unfortunate that Oracle did this.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[euxneks]

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.

MySQL needs to be forked, before it gets forked in the rear by Oracle.

...I apologise for the horrible pun.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[williamhb]

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.

Or, if we take off our doom-coloured spectacles, we might realise that Oracle (largely a server applications company) and Sun (largely a server hardware company) probably don't consider a niche open source desktop environment to be part of their core business. In other news, I hear the Dunlop tyre company hasn't spent much on improving the accessibility of car stereos either.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[exomondo]

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.

Sounds like a necessity if you plan on turning around a company that has been severely hemmorhaging cash.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[evil_aar0n]

Pardon my naivete, but couldn't this be an opportunity for some other company to step in and fill the gap left behind by Oracle?

Re:Capitalism at work...

[IntlHarvester]

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.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Al Dimond]

That's because OOo is a flaming pile of shit. High in the running for least inspired, most crufty, most flaky computer program I've ever used. Every version I've used has sucked in different ways, in approximately equal magnitude, so I don't really know what's lost if it's never updated again.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should it come as a surprise to anyone? Has everyone forgotten the CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison is known to be an affiliate or backer of Scientology? http://tinyurl.com/y9z2ext

I'm sure a ton of you hate RMS, but at-least he has some balls when it comes to morals on using software.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[VendettaMF]

Which is all well and good until you look at what else Oracle are cutting/dropping/lining up to destroy.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[VendettaMF]

MySQl is used by people capable of thought and pattern recognition.
MySQL is an important and useful tool for people who actually work with and on computers.

OOo is a cheap and nasty (and almost non-functional) attempt to annoy Microsoft.
OOo is used by people too cheap to pay for real tools to do their work.

There's a bit of a difference.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[that this is not und]

And it really bugs you guys at Microsoft that it exists, eh?

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle and Sun are somehow obligated to employ people charitably? I'd rather they stick to bottom-line stuff that contributes to their employees continuing to be employed in a profitable company.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also wanting to run an OS which is different from the ones sold by apple and microsoft makes one cheap?

anyway there is al a theory that all wordprocessors suck, with wich I agree:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the eyes of a pure capitalist it's also a sane decision to use slaves. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Xest]

It seems to be a growing trend- accessibility doesn't seem to matter anymore.

Just 5 to 10 years ago, it was a big deal, people made sure to factor it in to web design and so forth, but now we're at a stage where HTML5 is on the horizon, and it's added a load of new features without any care for accessibility- canvas and the video tag for example, in the case of the latter there really should've been the option to supply subtitles as an element parameter meaning even if people didn't want to supply subtitles themselves, 3rd parties could then for example, but instead the onus has been put on the content creator to place them in the video, unfortunately this method is also not parsable.

That, and this news are just two of many examples of a move away from a regime where accessibility is taken into account.

Maybe they're right, maybe we should stop caring about accessibility because in a way it requires a disproportionate amount of development time in relation to the amount of people actually served by it, but I always figured accessibility is just the right thing to do so that these people aren't left out.

Perhaps it is just a response to the tightening of belts over the last couple of years? Companies feel they can no longer afford to spend time on accessibility and it's just the core product that matters now?

Re:Capitalism at work...

[VendettaMF]

>> Also wanting to run an OS which is different from the ones sold by apple and microsoft makes one cheap?

Depends entirely on the reasons for which you wish to use it.
If for some reason you need a selection of C/C++ dev tools, plus several scripting languages, and an OS that is effectively a server OS on your desktop then fair enough, though what someone whose work/hobbies require such for is doing making office-style docs in any app is beyond me.

If on the other hand you just don't want to pay for your OS, and live somewhere that copyright is reliably enforced, and so choose the above OS, well, yeah, that's cheap and you're denying yourself a reasonable user experience through your cheapness.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[delinear]

Up to 20% of the population suffer some form of disability, and it's likely a significant higher proportion of site visitors suffer a disability (internet usage being higher in this group). If companies spend more than 20% of their time implementing accessibility then they're doing it wrong, it's not that difficult, but at the same time if they can afford to offer zero support to one in five of their potential customers then they're probably not going to stay in business too long.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[wrook]

OO is a very important project which has done a lot to show people that open source software is viable for desktop environments. But, and I say this as someone who uses oowriter every single day, it should be replaced with something better. There isn't a single program I use that causes me as much grief as oowriter. I'm working as a teacher in Japan right now and making handouts every day for my students -- actually, at this point I think it might be better to say I'm writing a textbook. I use a huge amount of clip art and I'm switching between Japanese and English a lot, so possibly my case isn't typical. But my documents get corrupted weekly. Sometimes the pictures delete themselves. Sometimes the fonts decide to change themselves randomly. Sometimes the document gets so bad that the cursor randomly jumps around the screen. When I am making my exams (which are very heavy with pictures) the scrolling the document is so slow that it takes 10 seconds to get to the end of the page.

I have slowly been writing latex macros so that I can finally ditch OO (it's quite difficult given the number of unique formatting I have to do, from word searches to crossword puzzles to bingo boards -- all with clip art liberally sprinkled on the page). When I'm done I won't be the least bit sorry to see the back of OO. But not everyone can sit down and write custom latex macros to format their stuff. I'm kind of hoping that a potential lack of OO funding will remind people of other solutions like KOffice or Abiword (which aren't quite there yet for my applications, but noticeably less crufty).

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Xest]

You're right that a large percentage of the population suffer disability, but you're wrong to assume that the same percentage require additional accessibility support with software.

That percentage includes things like Aspergers, ADHD, Depression, Epilepsy, Autism, ME, in some countries even obesity is included. None of these really prevent people using standard interfaces apart from in the most extreme circumstances.

So the percentage of people who actually need accessibility support from a development standpoint is drastically lower than the percentage of people with just some disability- no matter how mild it is.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[kobaz]

Pardon my naivete, but couldn't this be an opportunity for some other company to step in and fill the gap left behind by Oracle?

Sure. Any time there is a lapse in development from the big companies, the little ones have plenty of room to step in. But accessibility is not a huge market and it makes the most sense for one of the big companies to push it out as a loss-leader for community benefit.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[rwarfield]

MySQL Was forked when Sun bought it. That open source fork still exists

Re:Capitalism at work...

[ultranova]

MySQL needs to be forked, before it gets forked in the rear by Oracle.

Or you could just use PostgreSQL instead.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

hardly anyone has even bothered asking what's going to happen to OpenOffice.org.

Perhaps because IBM has also been shipping OpenOffice, so it's fairly reasonable to expect development to continue.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

No one asked about the JavaOne conference either. Will they toss it? Or will it be infused with a bunch of courses explaining why you should use Oracle products?

Re:Capitalism at work...

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

Good, that may mean we'll finally see a huge leap in PostgreSQL usage.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[thetoadwarrior]

OOo does more than enough for the average person. There is no reason to pay for the over priced insecure bloated shit known as Microsoft Office.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the purchase rules, they have to continue to support and actively develop mysql for the next five years. From what I know, there wasn't anything more said about it after the five years is up. So, you have five years before mysql is axed for good. Less than that now.

Oracle DB

[Chris Lawrence]

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.

Re:Oracle DB

[rtaylor]

there's still some stuff the core Oracle engine did ten years ago you can't get anywhere else

I am genuinely interested in what these include, particularly the business case or problem you are solving with them. There are lots of features or specific implementations of features that are unique to Oracle.

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:Oracle DB

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this have to do with accessibility? Way off point.

Re:Oracle DB

[Chris Lawrence]

I commented on accessibility on another thread. Sorry if the topic took me back. I didn't mean to reminisce inappropriately.

Re:Oracle DB

[subreality]

I am genuinely interested in what these include, particularly the business case or problem you are solving with them.

One from my limited experience: Recursive queries.

Example: Create a tree structure where every node has a reference to its parent. Now try to select all the leaf nodes under a given $node.

Several commercial DBMSes will let you do this directly (eg, CONNECT BY in Oracle). Postgres and MySQL cannot, and you have to create a loop where you select all nodes where parent = $node, then take that $list and select all nodes where there parent = $list; then repeat until you don't get anything back. There are performance penalties for this.

There are other ways to create trees in an RDBMS without a recursion feature, but you'll invariably end up having to either take a performance hit, or make updates significantly more complicated: your application has to update the tree metadata every time a node is added, deleted, or moved, which is just begging for referential integrity errors.

Re:Oracle DB

[afabbro]

• Standy databases. Yes, I know MySQL and PostgreSQL have some replication, but it's nothing like DataGuard. Do you want physical or logical? Log shipping or transactional? How about maybe you'd like to activate and test your standby database and then press a button and it's back to where it was?
• Oracle streams - a form of SQL-level replication. Master-slave, multimaster, transformational, complex business rules, etc. Nothing like it in open source.
• The whole family of Flashback: e.g., "I'd like to do a query and have the results as of the state of the database four hours ago". Or "I'd like to immediately change the database back to its state at 01:20:03am". Or "oops, I dropped a table, please bring it back instantly." Etc.
• High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression. You can encrypt it, too.
• For nearly every DB feature, Oracle has "more". It's great you have B-tree indexes - Oracle also offers bitmap and there are cases where they are really useful. It's nice that you offer hash partitioning (if you do), but Oracle can partition on a half-dozen different things. Etc.
• RAC (Real Application Clusters) - active/active (or as many "Actives" as you'd like) clusters, all instances talking to the same DB.
• Online redefinition (change your tables, views, etc. and have Oracle store everything up until you snap everything over at once - great for reducing downtimes).
• Very sophisticated introspection. By this I mean the amount of stats the DB collects on itself. There is an insane level of instrumentation and it's very easy to see where waits and delays are.
• Ability to generate and playback workloads.
• A lot of migration assistance - e.g., "here is how your database would run if you upgraded it", "here is the SQL that will not run as well if you upgrade", "here is the recommendation for fixing your PL/SQL to run better in the next version," etc.
• Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)
• Auditing is several orders of magnitude more advanced
• Star queries, OLAP, cubes, spatial, all of that.
• XML and text support are much better.
• Virtual Private Databases
• PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB, as well as an entire GUI-front-end building system (Application Express)
• A fully-integrated volume/filesystem manager (ASM), cluster software, and VM, all manageable by the DB ;-) ASM is really very nice.

I'm sure I'm missing some things - those were off the top of this Oracle DBA's head. Here is a quick list of features.

I love PostgreSQL as well, and MySQL to some extent, and even SQL Server. But they're not Oracle. DB/2 is the only thing approaching its class (along with more specialized niche players like Teradata). Most of the features I mentioned above don't come into play until you're in a 24x7 high availability environment, are trying to minimize downtime, or are working at big scale.

Re:Oracle DB

[fusiongyro]

That's actually something they just added in 8.4. I wrote a little bit about using this functionality on my blog. The syntax is different than Oracle's though.

Re:Oracle DB

[that this is not und]

An almost insane level of customizability

Be fair and don't call it insane. It's just what happens when a company is driven entirely by it's marketing department. A customer mentions a feature, it gets thrown into the stew. It doesn't matter if there's another way to do the same thing. Throw it in the stew. Make the kludge big and complex.

Re:Oracle DB

[Datasage]

It can be done in mysql without using loops, but its not as elegant and requires an extra table. Simply create an association table that links each child node back to each of its parents. You will have to keep it up to date, but it can be easily rebuilt if it gets out of sync. But the query then is as simple as joining that table when you need to select all the child nodes under a given parent.

Re:Oracle DB

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. We use Oracle Weblogic with ADF, and it's a really good framework. Yes, Jdeveloper is bloated and slow, but ADF is great for developing business apps.

Re:Oracle DB

[Anonymous Coward]

"High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression."

Uh, this is available by using a compressed filesystem.

Use a good OS.

"Standy databases. Yes, I know MySQL and PostgreSQL have some replication"

So they do have this, but not the one you want. Why not just say "they're not Oracle"?

"Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)"

personal preference. Same as the last one.

"XML and text support are much better."

Again, personal preference. Any metrics on how much better they are?

"The whole family of Flashback"

Another "it doesn't have the actual application I want". Rather reminiscent of the "GIMP will NEVER be enough because it doesn't do X (that only exists in the current version of Photoshop and didn't exist in versions earlier than some period, which, however, didn't stop PS being good enough to pay for)".

Is your real problem that these aren't expensive DBs and are FOSS?

"PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB"

what do yo mean native? I can use them with the others.

", as well as an entire GUI-front-end building system (Application Express)"

Again, another "it does it but not like Oracle and using an application for Oracle".

"A lot of migration assistance - e.g., "here is how your database would run if you upgraded it", "

How come you need DB engineers for Oracle, then? How come Oracle runs so slowly?

"For nearly every DB feature, Oracle has "more". "

Again, you're just saying what you decide is more.

"RAC (Real Application Clusters) "

1) You're paying out the wazoo (I've heard Oracle doesn't scale financially. It's right) for it, I should flipping coco you get application clusters working
2) Others do it too. By using the OS, rather than inventing the wheel. Again.

Re:Oracle DB

[Antique Geekmeister]

That's not because it's insanely flexible. That's because Oracle installers stink. I've had to rewrite the Linux installer every single time I've used it over more than a decade. It's nearly as stupid as the Java installers on Linux: it does _not_ take a running Java instance to simply drop a lot of files into a directory and make a few symlinks. I'm afraid that now we could have the worst of both worlds.

Re:Oracle DB

[harry666t]

> The syntax is different than Oracle's though.

We're talking about SQL. The world would end if the syntax wouldn't be different.

Re:Oracle DB

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true, but the big market does not need all those features. Oracle is big Business and Government oriented. MySQL PostgreSQL fill 95% of the market. In other words you can make money from a small market charging a lot , or make money from the big market charging a little. From this models it is clear which is the winner ( the lower price the better). The advantage of the MySQL or PostgreSQL is that they can expand and implement a lot of features without increase the cost. So the Q? which one the community should support? . Oracle isn't show to many efforts to embrace or support the Open Source community while MySQL before SUN was very useful and helpful for the WWW. If Oracle keeps its track the best options are fork it or Make PostgreSQL very competitive.

Re:Oracle DB

[GooberToo]

Oracle streams - a form of SQL-level replication.

Sounds like a subset of functionality is coming in PostgreSQL 9.0, which supports streaming replication in addition to transactional and log shipping.

High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression. You can encrypt it, too.

Here you can see Greenplum's commercial PostgreSQL offering which is 10x-20x faster than stock PostgreSQL. A large portion of its performance boost comes from its support of high performance and effective compression as well as parallelism. I strongly suspect its faster than Oracle in many use cases.

It's great you have B-tree indexes - Oracle also offers bitmap and there are cases where they are really useful. It's nice that you offer hash partitioning (if you do), but Oracle can partition on a half-dozen different things. Etc.

PostgreSQL has had bitmap indexes for a while now. Not to mention you can actually create your own index types too. PostgreSQL is very extensible. That's one of the reasons why PostGIS is so capable. And please note they just announced a major new release.

Let's also not forget PostgreSQL, like Oracle, supports function indexes, which are in of themselves extremely powerful.

Online redefinition (change your tables, views, etc. and have Oracle store everything up until you snap everything over at once - great for reducing downtimes).

PostgreSQL can do this too for most everything. There are some exceptions but by in large, PostgreSQL has this covered.

PostgreSQL is one of the few databases which supports transactional DDL and has done so for a very long time. So for example, you can create types populate and even create indexes within a single transactional boundary. Which means you can actually do all this within the confines of a TPC transaction, which can wait a long time (logging implications and caveats here). Then when ready you can commit the TPC transaction and *BLAM*, you new table, fully populated, with deferred index creation, is now online. That's just one example of what can be done with PostgreSQL.

Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)

PostgreSQL has very good query analysis features. Its query plans are also excellent and typically does so without the many hints Oracle often requires. Having said that, IMO, PostgreSQL query plans are only exceeded by that of Oracle's and even then PostgeSQL genetic planner offers capabilities to niche projects unavailable in even Oracle.

Virtual Private Databases

Hotly debated on PostgreSQL mailing lists. PostgreSQL offers this capability today via its schema and security models. They just don't call it VPDs.

PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB

PostgreSQL blows Oracle and every other database out of the water when it comes to native PL language support. What's you're flavor? PL/pgSQL? Perl? Python? Tcl? Java? C? Lua? And I think I many be forgetting a couple.

No bones about it, Oracle is more feature rich. It is true Oracle still addresses many high end solutions where stock PostgreSQL does not yet compete. Just the same, many commercial PostgreSQL offerings are starting to compete in arenas which were previously Oracle only domains. Furthermore, stock PostgreSQL continues to egress further and further into extremely large databases and warehousing solutions. Additionally, once you step outside of high end databases, for the vast majority of people, PostgreSQL is a very competitive solution to Oracle and in many cases, unofficially faster.

It sounds like you need to take a hard second look at PostgreSQL because based on my of your comments, it sounds like you're somewhat out of touch with the current capabilities and features provided by PostgreSQL.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Startup your Word Perfects, warm the laser printers, and start sending your demands under the Disabilities Act.

Bad title

[mysidia]

It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.

In other words, Oracle is going back on their word, and is perhaps about to show how dishonest, despicable, and evil they (apparently) are, or not, depending on whether they keep their word (or not).

Once you make a commitment, you can't "drop it". You either uphold your promise, or you break it.

It looks like Oracle's about to break their promise.

It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise. Oracle acquired Sun, so they acquired all their promises, obligations, and dirty laundry too.

Revising or 'dropping' a promise you made is called reneging on obligations you made.

When a company says they're committed to something, they've made a promise. They can't become "uncommitted" or "no longer committed" without either succeeding, or having lied in the first place.

Re:Bad title

[BadAnalogyGuy]

People cheat on their spouses all the time.

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if the world was as you described, but in business, it just doesn't hold good. There are no real commitments. The only real commitments are those that you are forced to uphold - not morally obliged to uphold. This is how companies have been doing business for a long time now.

Re:Bad title

[williamhb]

It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.

In other words, Oracle is going back on their word, and is perhaps about to show how dishonest, despicable, and evil they (apparently) are, or not, depending on whether they keep their word (or not).

Did I miss the press release -- does Sun now own Linux or Gnome in order to be solely responsible for its accessibility? Surely that'd be the bigger news story if it were true. I was under the impression, and I suspect so is everyone else on Slashdot, that Linux and Gnome are independent open source projects owned by the community; if Sun choses not to contribute code to a particular portion of the source tree any more, so be it, and we should thank them for their extensive work thus far, rather than pillory them for no longer being willing to be the only sucker actually doing anything about this community responsibility to improve Gnome's accessibility.

I mean... those villains at Sun/Oracle haven't repainted my house for me either, or swept my yard -- the scoundrels!

Re:Bad title

[B3ryllium]

But "drop" is an SQL command, thus, it makes the headline punny.

Re:Bad title

[Canberra Bob]

Revising or 'dropping' a promise you made is called reneging on obligations you made.

No, dropping a promise is not reneging on obligations. Sun promised to work on accessibility, however they were in absolutely no way obliged to work on accessibility. There is a big difference between the two.

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

A SQL command. That is if you pronounce SQL correctly.

Re:Bad title

[fm6]

I agree, the headline's wrong. But not about what got broken. When did Sun ever make a "commitment to accessibility"?

Here's what they did have: their perpetual fantasy that they could come up with a desktop that would challenge Windows. Their latest form of this fantasy was Java Desktop System, which actually has nothing to do with Java. It's just a rebranded GNOME, ported to Solaris. When I was at Sun, Sun Rays running JDS were all over the place, and JDS was heavily pushed at our customers. Though even within Sun, use of Windows or Mac PCs (usually laptops) got more and more pervasive.

JDS has to comply with federal accessibility rules, or nobody will buy it. (Nobody bought it anyway, but that's another issue.) So Sun needs GNOME to have good accessibility support. Presumably that's why Sun started contributing accessibility development. That's how all corporate contributions to OS projects happen — it isn't generosity, it's the contributor needing the product to do something it doesn't already do.

I haven't seen any announcement, but it's to be expected that Oracle will finally put an end to this expensive and futile quest for a Windows-killer. Which is why you can't find JDS anywhere on oracle.com. (The old JDS page on sun.com redirects to Oracle's Solaris page.) If Oracle doesn't need JDS, then they don't need accessibility software.

One of many Sun windmill-tilting projects that are getting the axe.

Re:Bad title

[paimin]

SQL (Structured Query Language) (pronounced /s.kjul/ ES-kyoo-EL )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

Re:Bad title

[war4peace]

It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise. Oracle acquired Sun, so they acquired all their promises, obligations, and dirty laundry too.

No shit. I promise I will give all my friends 1 million bucks each. Now you go ahead and adopt me.

Re:Bad title

[exomondo]

It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.

The commitment was made by Sun, Oracle is dropping the commitment made by Sun - or 'Sun's Commitment'.

Re:Bad title

[mysidia]

Unless you are worth more than $1 million X (number of your friends), nobody should adopt you, then.

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a douche. That is if you pronounce douche correctly.

Re:Bad title

[war4peace]

Hence you answered your own question right there. If Sun made promises that exceed the benefits, then they should be dropped.

Re:Bad title

[mysidia]

No, that doesn't mean you can drop promises. If you made promises that exceeded your value -- than nobody in their right mind should want to merge with you.

Since merging with you means that your promises become their promises also.

Re:Bad title

[that this is not und]

if Sun choses not to contribute code to a particular portion of the source tree any more, so be it,

If they choose to renege on a commitment they made to contribute code to a particular project......

We're back where we were. Your smoothing over is a little lumpy....

Re:Bad title

[keithjr]

Nobody bought it anyway, but that's another issue.

No, I don't think that's another issue. I think that's THE issue. Many people look upon Sun's implosion as a reckoning that a mainstream tech company can't put all of its software eggs into the FOSS basket. If Oracle agrees, one can expect more hard-to-monetize ideas and projects bite the dust.

Re:Bad title

[harmonise]

They can't become "uncommitted" or "no longer committed" without either succeeding, or having lied in the first place.

Surely, you mean they did a 'rollback'.

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

I am confused... where in the acquisition did Oracle state that they would take on any and all obligations, implied or explicit, that Sun may have made in the past and present? As far as I can see, acquisition of another company does not imply any commitment like that. While it is regrettable that this happened, I don't see what all the panic is about. Surely, Oracle may yet continue their contributions to accessibility on various levels (apps, Linux, ...) even without two former Sun employees? I am certain that Oracle currently employs enough quality developers, both on the Linux side and elsewhere, to contribute. I hope they will.

I think that in acquisitions consolidation of work force always tends to lead to some terminations, I would have liked to see Willie Walker & Co to remain with now-Oracle, but I expect that they won't be unemployed for very long - and surely there are other companies that would be willing to offer them a job and have them continue their work on accessibility, even if only as part of their job function.

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

it's pronounced just like "sequel" you smarmy flapper

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

There may now be several former Sun engineers willing to repaint your house and sweep your yard.

Re:Bad title

[hazah]

augh... just augh.

Re:Bad title

[fm6]

It's "the" issue if you're talking about Sun's self-destruction. Except I was talking about why Oracle fired the people who did Linux accessibility (see TFA).

But since you raise the issue, I might as well address it. You're making the standard mistake about Sun's business model and why that model failed. Because Sun mostly made the news when something happened with its software initiatives, people tend to assume that software was the core of the business model, and the failure of these software initiatives was the direct cause of the failure of the business model.

One little detail: Sun was never a software company. They did software, and they had dreams of being a major player in the software arena. But all their attempts to realize these dreams failed, and their original hardware business was always crucial to their business model. This gets obscured because hardware doesn't make big news.

A few years ago, Sun released the X4600, which at the time was the most powerful 4 rack-unit x64 server on the market. (It was only recently supplanted — by another Sun product; I was the docs lead for both.) You probably never heard of the X4600 — 4U servers are just not that newsworthy. But it was a big profit center for Sun. Being able to cram more processing power into less rack space is a big deal for today's overcrowded data centers.

(It could have been even bigger if Sun's marketing and sales organization had ever come to terms with the fact that SPARC-based systems were a non-sell for most customers. Instead, they kept trying to sell SPARC boxes to people who didn't want them, and x64 systems never accounted for more than a small part of Sun's sales, despite the huge amounts Sun spent to move into this product area. I expect this to change under Oracle: SPARC systems will only be marketed to customers for whom they make sense, and other customers will no longer be told that they need to abandon their huge investments in x86 technology.)

Sun failed because their hardware business model failed; the failure of their software businesses hurt (and could have helped if they'd been successful) but were never crucial to the survival of the company.

Re:Bad title

[mysidia]

Out of curiosity... does OracleDB allow you to rollback a single SQL transaction that was already successfully committed, by using the rollback SQL command? :)

That would make that rather clever a response :-)

How about if other [non-data-dependent, in terms of relations or rows modified] transactions have been committed after it. Can you use a vendor-supplied command to rollback just one older TXN in Oracle without displacing new transactions, or disrupting the DB?

Most SQL database engines don't even provide any 'rollback' mechanism. Other than PITR after a catastrophe, where you restore a full DB backup, you remove/move transaction logs after the point you want to recover to some other place, or direct the DB not to restore records after X point, and then start the recovery.

However, given Oracle's lofty (unimaginably high price, which removes it from even the remote list of options my Enterprise can ever even consider), I would expect them to have concocted something better.

Re:Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I miss the press release -- does Sun now own Linux or Gnome in order to be solely responsible for its accessibility?

Being solely responsible has nothing to do with the matter at hand, and I have no idea whether you've missed any press release or not. Totally irrelevant.

The issue is very simple: Oracle bought Sun, including any and all assets, personnel, commitments, debts, and so on. If Oracle is now backing down from something Sun promised to do, then Oracle is now breaking that promise.

It's really fucking simple.

Now, whether Sun promised it or not, I have no idea, but it should be easy enough to find out. About as easy as it is to see your empty hand-waving for what it is.

Meh.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[0x000000]

Why? Oracle is not required under any laws to provide development time to help make Linux or any OS more friendly towards people with disabilities. Sun was doing this out of their own great good heart.

It is in their best interest to make Solaris/OpenSolaris more friendly towards people with disabilities in an attempt to capture more market share that otherwise would go to Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows where such products already exist.

Good Luck.

[ddxexex]

I have to agree with Joanie that I hope that the laying off (not fired as in the summary) was an accident. But since they've laid off a bunch of other people working for accessibilty, it doesn't look all that good. Hope the letter helps, but if they've already started I don't think they mind having the bad "we don't like the disabled/orphans/elderly/puppies " PR. Good luck for getting the letter to work.

Re:Good Luck.

[osssmkatz]

Disabled people do not need your pity. They do need your support. I was unaware of these projects. As a disabled technology guy, that's sad. I support these efforts.

Bad taste joke

[Cryacin]

I guess the blind didn't see that one coming!

They should have consulted the Oracle!

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here till next thursday, please tip your waitress!

Re:Bad taste joke

[WaywardGeek]

Oh, come on! He's funny! Even to a guy losing his vision! Sorry to debase myself by talking about flambait mods...

Gnome rivalry

[gomek-ramek]

Maybe the folks at Oracle use KDE.

Re:Gnome rivalry

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously posting as anonymous, but no. We are a gnome place.

Re:Gnome rivalry

[BadAnalogyGuy]

That explains the hairy feet and ridiculous hats.

Business

[JeremyGNJ]

Perhaps Sun has "promised" too much over the years on things that don't produce a return on investment. Perhaps this is why Oracle scooped them up. Perhaps Oracle wants to remain profitable.

Re:Business

[betterunixthanunix]

So what? That division was a good thing for society; the loss of it is a *bad* thing for society, and the fact that nobody is stepping in to pick it up is a bad thing too.

Re:Business

[jabbathewocket]

So if sun had gone bankrupt rather than been bought, and the employees who got laid off got laid off along with *everyone else* doing anything open source @ sun.. would that have been a better outcome? Its time to get out of the 60s and realize that NOTHING is contributed by companies to Linux or any other open source project "because its the right thing to do", it is either done because they HAVE to do it due to licensing issues, or because they feel that long term it is a cost neutral decision, or will net them a profit in some way down the road (even if said profit is based on the idea that making Linux more usable will sell more copies of their hardware/software that lives on top of Linux)

If you want good for society, you should be looking to foundations, and government to fund it, not public companies who have to be accountable to shareholders.. who generally frown on expenses that are not either required by law, or aimed at generating a profit (sadly in an ever and ever shorter time frame these days but thats another article)

A company choosing to stay in business rather than paying people to do stuff that is of little to no benefit in the short or long term (accessibility implies desktop, which is not making ANYONE money in Linux landscape.. try justifying that expense to shareholders in this economy, go ahead we will wait)

Argue all you want that someone should pickup the torch, but implying that its somehow "good for society" that a company that is buying another company as they crash toward bankruptcy court, should somehow "keep doing" things that clearly contributed to its slide into bankruptcy.. is the ultimate 60s era naivety, that the open source community in general seems to be afflicted with..

Re:Business

[nxtw]

That division was a good thing for society; the loss of it is a *bad* thing for society, and the fact that nobody is stepping in to pick it up is a bad thing too

Lots of things are good for society. If this is so important, why don't *you* volunteer to help with open source accessibility?

And if the "good" things drive a company towards failure? Then there is less competition, less employees paying taxes to pay for social programs that benefit those who need accessibility features, etc.

Re:Business

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want good for society, you should be looking to foundations, and government to fund it, not public companies who have to be accountable to shareholders.. who generally frown on expenses that are not either required by law, or aimed at generating a profit (sadly in an ever and ever shorter time frame these days but thats another article)

If the NYTimes or the Wall Street Journal ran a headline tomorrow that said "Oracle turns its back & abandons disabled users" you can bet that the shareholders would have a collective heart attack. All it would take is enough media attention & Oracle would do a complete 180 just to keep their public image (and by extension, their stock value).
But as long as nobody in the media pays attention, neither will Oracle; it's all about the bottom line.

Re:Business

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they run a story "Open Source turns its back & abandons disabled users" which would be just as truthful and just as misleading. You talk as if Oracle owes Gnome accessibility something - they don't.

Re:Business

[that this is not und]

should somehow "keep doing" things that clearly contributed to its slide into bankruptcy..

I have yet to see anybody clearly demonstrate that this group contributed to Sun's slide to bankruptcy.

Can somebody present facts to back that assertion up?

Holy crip he's a crapple !

[Gothmolly]

Survival of the fittest, my friends.

Section 508 still holds

[Anonymous Coward]

The main guideline for accessibility is Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. From the Wikipedia entry: "The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology."

So if you want to sell to the federal government, you have to be 508 compliant. The EU has a comparable set of regulations. Oracle knows this and won't jeopardize their government sales by ignoring it, the opinions of the quoted blogger notwithstanding.

Re:Section 508 still holds

[WaywardGeek]

I suppose we could complain about Oracle selling inaccessible RedHat clone licenses, which are not accessible because the RedHat code they copied doesn't properly support Sun's accessiblity code (Orca, in particular).

Anyone know a good lawyer who might want to do a bit of pro-bono work for the blind?

Re:Section 508 still holds

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent up. Oracle's decision here is interesting, because Orca doesn't really fall into any of their mainline government lines of business. There's very little Linux/Sun desktop intrusion. It is, and for the foreseeable future continues to be, a Microsoft dominated user desktop.

And what does that mean for 508? The rules should still apply, but you'd be amazed what I've seen sneak under the fence under the pretense that the only people who will interface with the product have physical ability requirements *anyway* that would preclude a visually disabled person from holding the position.

508 holds bigger more serious challenges in the web app space. There are very (painfully) few frameworks that properly describe AJAX to a reader. Where's the accessibility section in HTML5? Where's the framework? How do you expect a new generation of technical adoption to occur when one of the largest single-entity organizations *cannot* acquire said technology because it does directly interface with the user and doesn't work properly?

There are big, big questions looming for the accessibility space. Orca is a small part of it, and I would hope that Oracle isn't going to be so stupid as to let two people go when so many of their products these days rely on web front ends that will, eventually, need to speak a language that readers like Orca understand.

Re:Section 508 still holds

[nxtw]

Oracle knows this and won't jeopardize their government sales by ignoring it

How much of what Oracle sells is subject to this?

It seems to apply to end-user hardware and software, which would exclude Oracle's main database product...

Re:Section 508 still holds

[nxtw]

Anyone know a good lawyer who might want to do a bit of pro-bono work for the blind?

Is Section 508 something more than a set of obligations for Federal government agencies?

Re:Section 508 still holds

[msclrhd]

On the web space, there is ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) [http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php] that is bridging that gap -- even Microsoft IE8 supports it.

For HTML5, there is the CSS speech specification [http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-css3-speech-20041216/] and others [http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/Overview.html].

In addition, there are guidelines to creating accessible web pages -- things like having an alt tag on images.

oracle = evil? who knew

[bender183]

Come on, srsly. You had to know oracle was going to pull something like this. They don't care about people, they care about $$$. That's the bottom line. Period.

Re:oracle = evil? who knew

[that this is not und]

Whenever someone tries to come up with a real-world equivalent of one of the evil powerful dudes from a James Bond film, it's funny how Larry Ellison always makes the list.

Some perspective

[PCM2]

While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that's a shame... but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.

Also, Oracle already sponsored an OpenSolaris accessibility group, and now they're in charge of the OpenOffice accessibility work as well, to say nothing of making sure their business applications are up to government standards... is it really fair to expect it to shoulder the burden of accessibility for Gnome, too?

Maybe Novell wants to hire these guys? Or Red Hat?

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.

Re:Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like a reasonable solution. Sun spent a lot on accessibility and didn't get enough credit for it, certainly not from the OSS crowd.

Re:Some perspective

[nxtw]

My preference would be Canonical (Ubuntu), but RedHat would be a decent fit, and I could even live with Novell.

SInce when has Canonical ever contributed anything major to the non-Ubuntu community?

With their more or less nonexistent track record in doing so, and uncertain financial future, preferring Canonical only seems rational if you want to see failure...

Re:Some perspective

[fusiongyro]

I'd tend to agree, but then again, to develop this kind of thing requires a lot of special information. You can't just throw somebody into developing accessibility software, and I doubt you can just wait for a community member to show up and start writing it. The target market here can get pissed off about the quality of the software without necessarily having the ability to acquire and apply the skills necessary to fix it. And as others have pointed out, the ADA makes accessibility legally mandatory rather than optional for lots of government deployment scenarios.

It sounds histrionic to me too, but I can't think of anyone qualified to write this stuff or anyone whose livelihood depends on it either. There may be reason for the outcry.

Re:Some perspective

[PCM2]

And as others have pointed out, the ADA makes accessibility legally mandatory rather than optional for lots of government deployment scenarios.

That's why I'm thinking Novell or Red Hat. You think they don't wanna sell Linux desktops to government customers? Oracle has invested plenty into Linux, but the desktop area isn't so much its concern.

Re:Some perspective

[xant]

While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that's a shame... but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.

You know, as the parent, and the article said, if a project is in trouble because of two layoffs, then that project must have been in trouble before they were laid off too. And you can quote me on that.

Re:Some perspective

[WaywardGeek]

I have specific reasons for prefering Ubuntu. In particular, I use it at work. Even more specifically, I'm losing my central vision, and have decided to take some control over accessibility in the distro I use. I'm working with other guys on a derivation of Ubuntu for the blind and visually impaired - Vinux. So far as I can tell, there are two really good linux distros for accessibility: Vinux, and Adriane Knoppix. I'm working with the founder of Vinux, Tony Sales, to build the Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid release. I prefer a full-fledged Linux distro, as an experienced Linux user. Klaus, the author of Knoppix, has a blind wife, named Adriane. Klaus wrote Adrian Knoppix for beginning blind users, and it's a great distro for that purpose, just not what I personally need.

There are a host of other reasons, too. Fedora is great, but doesn't ship proprietary hardware drivers. That's a much bigger problem for the blind, since they really can't debug a system that wont speak to them. It's also less stable than Ubuntu - that's not saying much, but it's true! For example, Fedora was the first distro to force PulseAudio on us, which was a disastor for the blind for about two years. For these various reasons, Ubuntu seems to have attracted the largest blind community, so I think it makes sense for Willie to go there. Frankly, if he'd been there instead of at Sun all these years, Linux accessibility would be far better than it is today.

Re:Some perspective

[WaywardGeek]

You can't just throw somebody into developing accessibility software

Very true! When I first started playing with Ubuntu accessibility, the blind were all upset about PulseAudio, but the Ubuntu screen reader worked perfectly for me. I didn't understand what they were upset about, and so I didn't put any time into tracking down the problems. Instead, I began training my ear to listen at very high speed. Now that I can hear properly, it's plain as day that a 1/2 second delay in speech was making Ubuntu as painful as a root canal. I've joined with other guys to track down the problems, and now Ubuntu is much better. Imagine debugging a sound problem you can't even hear? What if you worked on the speech synthesis tool I used to generate that sound file I linked to, and I came and said it sounds distorted today, compared to yesterday's release?

That's exactly what happened with this speech synthesizer. When you ask it to generate 22KHz sample-rate audio, it actually gives you 11KHz, which no one would notice unless they tried to play it at very high speed. I've reported the bug, but the developers have long since moved to a different company. I'm stuck with sucky 11KHz sound for life.

Re:Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you will find that a lot of the GNOME accessibility work was related to Solaris, and that the Linux accessibility benefits are largely due to both Solaris and Linux having GNOME available as desktop environment. As far as I can determine, Sun's support for these developments mainly came from a need to be compliant with federal requirements for accessibility, specifically in order to get Solaris on desktops viable for federal contracts. The benefits to Linux are significant, but I think it is a bit of a stretch to put he primary focus on Linux and on Sun supporting Linux accessibility as a primary interest.

Re:Some perspective

[Rexdude]

As for OpenOffice accessibility, kiss it goodbye on Linux.

Meanwhile, IBM makes available Lotus Symphony for free(also available as a component of Notes 8+). Which fully supports OpenDocument standards, as well as Office 2007. And is also accessibility compliant, as are all other IBM products (due to previously mentioned US govt. standards). And is available on Windows, Ubuntu and Mac OS.

Of course Symphony isn't perfect, it has its drawbacks as well.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun was doing this because they hoped it would profit them later one and that is the only reason.

If there's a need

[Dunbal]

Since when did decisions by profit maximizing big business have any impact on Open Source Software? Yes, it may have been nice that Sun was spending money on supporting this sort of thing, but why have you come to expect - nay, DEPEND on a hand-out, as if the very life of the program was tied to it?

When there is a need, the code will get written. By the grandson of the blind grandmother. Or the father of the deaf child. That has been the story of the whole open source movement to date. If you don't like what Oracle is doing, then fork and to hell with them. If you're whining because your subsidized job has been canceled - well too bad. Life sucks sometimes.

There's a reason Sun was losing money and got bought out. If you can't work on your project without pay, well, your motives have suddenly become clear. You don't care about the project but rather the paycheck. Stop pointing out how wonderful your project was going to be - because obviously it isn't important enough for you to keep working on it without being paid. And for God's sake don't blame Oracle for taking a business decision. I know it's hard to think this way today in the United Socialist States of America, but maybe Oracle doesn't want to go under like Sun did and therefore is canceling frivolous "feel good" projects that add ZERO to their bottom line.

Re:If there's a need

[nxtw]

Since when did decisions by profit maximizing big business have any impact on Open Source Software?

since the 90s at the very latest.

When there is a need, the code will get written.

I think you underestimate the importance of corporate contributions. A more accurate statement would be: "When there is a need, a suitable commercial product will be licensed, or if none is available and the need is sufficient, the code will get written."

Re:If there's a need

[Dunbal]

No I am well aware of the role that corporate contributions have played - like IBM's help with Apache, etc. I also am not a particular fan of Oracle and their 5 or more figure licensing fees for their closed source programs.

However to expect a corporation to fund a project indefinitely is ludicrous. The author of TFA is by no means a saint despite trying to portray Oracle as the "evil company" that wants to deny worldwide access to this "free" technology. Oracle is by no means obliged to continue every program they acquired with their purchase of Sun. And Oracle has been under a lot of flak for MySQL, too, by none other than billionaire Widenius (oh I forgot I already got paid a billion dollars for it but OH NO don't let Oracle have "my" program!). So it's "we hate Oracle" year here on slashdot, but frankly why should Oracle (and hence Oracle customers) continue to subsidize the inefficient development of accessibility tools when it would be cheaper for the whole world to (shudder) have the few people who need such technology just use Windows. Heck it would be cheaper for Oracle to BUY those people a copy of Windows, and list it under "charitable donations" on their balance sheet.

If it was so important to help these (omg the disabled! we HAVE to do something!) people, Oracles withdrawal of support would only slow down - not destroy, these projects.

Re:If there's a need

[nxtw]

No I am well aware of the role that corporate contributions have played - like IBM's help with Apache, etc.

Are you really well aware of the role that corporate contributions have played? It's much more than one large company helping out with one project. The Apache Software Foundation and Free Software Foundation have significant corporate sponsorship. 75% of Linux kernel code is written by paid developers. Continued Firefox development is made possible via search royalties. Red Hat is significantly involved in many of the projects that make modern Linux systems useful.

I seriously doubt open source software would be anywhere as near as useful as it is today without the extensive corporate sponsorship and contributions. I don't think it'd be very competitive outside of perhaps academia.

However to expect a corporation to fund a project indefinitely is ludicrous

I didn't say otherwise. I really don't care about accessible open-source software.

Re:If there's a need

[pydev]

maybe Oracle doesn't want to go under like Sun did and therefore is canceling frivolous "feel good" projects that add ZERO to their bottom line.

Actually, having a extra bunch of good accessibility guys on their payroll would have contributed to their bottom line. Their decision is rather shortsighted.

Re:If there's a need

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did decisions by profit maximizing big business have any impact on Open Source Software? Yes, it may have been nice that Sun was spending money on supporting this sort of thing, but why have you come to expect - nay, DEPEND on a hand-out, as if the very life of the program was tied to it?

When there is a need, the code will get written. By the grandson of the blind grandmother. Or the father of the deaf child. That has been the story of the whole open source movement to date. If you don't like what Oracle is doing, then fork and to hell with them. If you're whining because your subsidized job has been canceled - well too bad. Life sucks sometimes.

There's a reason Sun was losing money and got bought out. If you can't work on your project without pay, well, your motives have suddenly become clear. You don't care about the project but rather the paycheck. Stop pointing out how wonderful your project was going to be - because obviously it isn't important enough for you to keep working on it without being paid. And for God's sake don't blame Oracle for taking a business decision. I know it's hard to think this way today in the United Socialist States of America, but maybe Oracle doesn't want to go under like Sun did and therefore is canceling frivolous "feel good" projects that add ZERO to their bottom line.

I really hope you get fired on account of your rude insensitive comments!! since you seem to be emotionally disabled.

Re:If there's a need

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you appreciate the difference between being able to work on a project full-time, and having it as a side project that you juggle with your real job.

Re:If there's a need

[MadcapMac]

You had me until your anti-socialist rant. A. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be paid to do what you love. Wanting to get paid != cares ONLY about the money. B. The free software movement IS a socialist movement, so I'm not sure what "United Socialist States of America" has to do with anything.

Linux often not sold

[cwgmpls]

As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.

A lot of Linux gets deployed in government settings, not because somebody sells it, but because a local agency, school or office picks it up and realizing it is useful and free. This was possible as long as Sun was doing the heavy lifting of developing access tools that are required in government settings, under section 508 and ADA.

If accessibility development for Linux goes away, U.S. government offices and schools won't be able to use Linux. Oracle isn't mandated to do accessibility development in this situation, because they aren't selling anything. Somebody's going to have to pick this up if they want Linux to be viable in U.S. government and public schools.

Re:Linux often not sold

[that this is not und]

It sounds like an opportunity for Red Hat to actually do something besides just sit there and still exist.

Re:Linux often not sold

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat still exists?

Re:Linux often not sold

[wastedlife]

As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.

Oracle is not selling Linux? Maybe someone should tell them.

Re:Linux often not sold

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression that Oracle does sell linux.

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.htm

Re:Linux often not sold

[cwgmpls]

Oracle distributes Linux under the GPL. The software has no cost. You can download it yourself here. (It is actually just re-branded Red Hat). Oracle does charge for supporting Linux, but section 508 does not apply to services, only to products. Since Oracle is not selling Linux software, they have no legal obligation to make it accessible.

Of course U.S. schools and government offices still have to make their computers accessible, under 508 and under the ADA. But Oracle is more than happy to re-sell Windows desktops and sell Windows support to that market, where Microsoft has already funded the development to make Windows accessible

Doesn't seem to match with their own words...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oracle is committed to creating accessible technologies and products that enhance the overall workplace environment and contribute to the productivity of our employees, our customers, and our customers' customers."
—Safra Catz, President and CFO, Oracle (http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/index.html)

Some people do what they promise, while others seem to work at Oracle... :-(

Linux is often not sold

[cwgmpls]

As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.

A lot of Linux gets deployed in government settings, not because somebody sells it, but because a local agency, school or office picks it up and realizing it is useful and free. This was possible as long as Sun was doing the heavy lifting of developing access tools that are required in government settings, under section 508 and ADA.

If accessibility development for Linux goes away, U.S. government offices and schools won't be able to use Linux. Oracle isn't mandated to do accessibility development in this situation, because they aren't selling anything. Somebody's going to have to pick this up if they want Linux to be viable in U.S. government and public schools.

Re:Linux is often not sold

[nxtw]

I think I've read this before...

As long as Oracle is not selling Linux

Oracle is selling Linux. Or at least "support" for it, which includes patches. Now they're also selling Solaris, or at least "support" for it.

A lot of Linux gets deployed in government settings, not because somebody sells it, but because a local agency, school or office picks it up and realizing it is useful and free.

Really?
You mean there aren't a whole lot of RHEL or SLES subscriptions from the US government?

If accessibility development for Linux goes away, U.S. government offices and schools won't be able to use Linux.

So someone else should subsidize accessibility development for the US government?

Re:Linux is often not sold

[afabbro]

Oracle is selling Linux. Or at least "support" for it, which includes patches.

That is a very powerful "at least". Oracle does not sell Linux. You can download OEL. You cannot buy it. You can buy SUPPORT for it, but there is no way to "buy" OEL.

Re:Linux is often not sold

[nxtw]

That is a very powerful "at least". Oracle does not sell Linux. You can download OEL. You cannot buy it. You can buy SUPPORT for it, but there is no way to "buy" OEL.

Patches are not freely downloadable from Oracle; these require an active support subscription.

Re:Linux is often not sold

[cwgmpls]

Sorry for the double post. This crazy javascripted interface means that things don't end up where you expect. And there is no way to delete a post after it is posted.

So someone else should subsidize accessibility development for the US government?

That is basically the point. Although it is not so much a subsidy for the government, as it is a subsidy for people. The U.S. has decided that whenever possible, technology should be developed in a way that is accessible to people with disabilities. The U.S. accomplishes this by requiring that software sold to the government be accessible. Microsoft subsidizes this development for Windows. For many years Sun carried the water for Gnome. Now someone else will have to step up to the plate if they want Linux to be viable on the desktop.

Re:Linux is often not sold

[nxtw]

The U.S. has decided that whenever possible, technology should be developed in a way that is accessible to people with disabilities.

Seems to me that the US is required by law to make irrational purchasing decisions.

A11Y as a form of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

It really strikes me that as this is such an important and empowering technology, and a part of the GNOME desktop no less, that it should fall to the people of the Free Software Foundation (or I guess more correctly of the GNU Project) to make this a high priority project, and see that it gets the attention it deserves.

Insightful!?

[aztracker1]

It's not like anybody would ever think of such a thing.

Re:Insightful!?

[kobaz]

What leads you to believe that both of those projects are forks of MySQL? I'm not familiar with either one, but from the little poking I've done... they seem to have nothing to do with MySQL/

Re:Insightful!?

[kobaz]

Arg... Haha... Apparently I missed this on the drizzle site:

"The code is originally derived from MySQL."

But I don't see such mention on the planetmariadb site.

Re:Insightful!?

[aztracker1]

Iirc there's been a few others too, I was looking for mysql forks and lead there from other resources.

Re:Oracle DB connectors

[b4dc0d3r]

Just don't try to get to it from SQL Server. What a nightmare to set up and maintain. Queries time out, leaving the SQL job thinking it's connected but Oracle is just sitting there, for days on end. No our SQL timeouts aren't disabled.

Initial setup was a pain as well. 600MB install to get a handful of .dlls to make an Oracle.OleDB connection. The "client lite" installs didn't work one bit - kinda like some random guy putting files in a zip and telling you to put random things in random folders and run an arcane command-line utility to "install" it. Nope, doesn't work. 600MB here we go.

Universal installer - holy crap, I can watch it paint itself, like we're back in the days of NT 4 Server on a p233-MMX. Paint some lines, wait for disk IO, paint some more. Over MSTSC, the installer repaints each window 3 times. No other app behaves like that.

It might be a good database server, but it doesn't like to be connected to anything but itself. Or maybe we can just say it hates Windows. Either way, it's the part of the job I hate. Sure blame me for not being qualified, I was hired as ASP+SQL and they don't let me DBA, nor set aside time for training, and the Oracle drivers are unsupported. So it's all me fighting the beast. At least they could declaw it, or feed it before selling it to people so it doesn't immediately eat their souls.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Why? Oracle is not required under any laws to provide development time to help make Linux or any OS more friendly towards people with disabilities. Sun was doing this out of their own great good heart.

It is in their best interest to make Solaris/OpenSolaris more friendly towards people with disabilities in an attempt to capture more market share that otherwise would go to Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows where such products already exist.

Actually, they did this because if Sun wants to get Solaris with GNOME on government desktops they need to have accessibility. So this is to comply with government contracts. Nobody pays for this kind of thing out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a public-ly traded company.. sheesh. sri

I'm confused.

[CherniyVolk]

I read the article, heart warming indeed. I am grateful of corporate assistance in Open Source, I render respect and appreciation for what has come as a result of combining capitalistic economics with social/community based efforts. A lot can happen put the two together.

But, the article seems to portray doom and utter failure if it weren't for paid sponsorship of a particular sliver of Open Source projects. This is where the confusion sets in, because while there is a lot to thank business and their contributions, a lot has been done the by the community at large. I think Accessibility Features will continue, but perhaps not with the same zeal (this I understand, not sure how many disabled hackers there are out there). Progress will continue.

It sure seems to me, that Open Source projects really started getting much better in the early 2000s. About the same time the dot-com bubble burst and put a lot of skilled programmers on the street looking for new career paths. I never saw any reports, no stats to back this up, but it did seem this way. Anyways, after 9/11 I was one of those out looking for a new job, and I just sat at home and did whatever; which included coding.

Now that's Capitalism in all it's irony if you ask me; try to save a little money by laying off high skilled people and using those 6 figure salaries to pay executive bonuses, only to later lose billions in market share because those ex-employees continued working on their own anyways in different areas and fields.

Duplication of effort?

[WheelDweller]

Is it possible, like with the accounting departments, that two of these departments won't be needed, and one was disbanded? Why does everything with you guys have to be rich=evil? Sometimes rich=smart.

Re:Oracle DB connectors

[Chris Lawrence]

Hey, I still miss the day they got rid of the curses installer for the java crap. :) However, I was fortunate enough to work in IT for 15 years, and I never once ran Windows. My Oracle experience is mostly on Solaris, with some HP and Linux. Believe it or not, the last time I ran Windows on my personal desktop was when 3.1 was still current. I actually made it a condition of my employment, I'd tell my boss straight up on my first day, that I won't run Windows, let me know now if that is a problem.

Is it wrong...

[Lord Kano]

This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more.

When I read this my first thought was "They should march...Um. I guess they can't."

LK

a11y work?

[religious freak]

Will someone please inform a person too lazy to do more than a couple quick google searches, what, precisely "a11y work" is?

I can infer by context, but a concrete definition is always best for the geek brain.

Re:a11y work?

[religious freak]

Couldn't help one more query (a little more sensible) where I eventually found the definition...

Accessibility is often abbreviated to the numeronym a11y, where the number 11 refers to the number of letters omitted. This parallels the abbreviations of internationalization and localization as i18n and l10n respectively.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_accessibility

Re:a11y work?

[WaywardGeek]

I think it's a Braille abbreviation for accessibility. The blind typically only read Braille at about 60 words per minute, or about a quarter of what most people can read. To be more productive, the blind prefer very long words to be abbreviated. Modern Braille computer displays even do this shortening automatically.

It turns out that Linux hackers like to abbriviate, too, and a11y seems to show up all over the place in accessibility code. Or, maybe they're just trying to be cool.

Re:a11y work?

[atfrase]

I had the same reaction; I had to take a guess and type out "accessibility" in the address bar just to confirm the number of letters.

But really, can we please stop abbreviating every somewhat long word with numbers? "txtspk" (or whatever clueless news anchors are calling the SMS dialect these days) is bad enough, but if you're writing for the general public (even the slashdotting public), is it really so hard to use your words?

Re:Lawyers at work...

[ziggygushi]

Its not in there best interest if they get sued or investigated by the DoJ under the ADA act. Even if its groundless there's no way to spin that in the PR world. Plus if they don't support accessibility there goes there government contracts. The feds can buy software taht isn't disability friendly. (Period) Odds are they had some peeny pushing moron over there make a cut without thinking.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[0x000000]

I humbly stand corrected.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Sri Ramkrishna]

awww.. you can sit, it's no big deal. :) sri

stupid

[pydev]

Experienced accessibility and GUI guys are hard to find and important to a company the size of Oracle. The people working on Gnome accessibility are quite good.

Oracle should have kept them. They could have put them to work on other projects and let them continue Gnome work on the side.

I'm sure Oracle is helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

By ensuring that the developers in question have more time available to work on open source solutions

I'm reminded of a post by realinvalidname

[Anonymous Coward]

31012464

blurb = "The Sun %s project, which we mentioned a few years ago on Slashdot, is being shut down in the wake of the Oracle acquisition.

That should save the editors a little time over the next few weeks as they iterate over every minimally-viable, staff-of-three Sun mini-project that has been terminated by Oracle.

important work for the disabled, and the lazy

[cenc]

I don't get it. Everyone here keeps talking like work on accessibility for the disabled is somehow a charity operation, even in open source land. Like there needs to be laws to mandated it, or no one would do it. Work on accessibility is a very very important corner of computer science in general. It is where some of the most groundbreaking crap us lazy people (sorry, the motivationally challenged) have derived the stuff we take for granted everyday now on our phones, our call centers, and so on. To talk about this sort of work as if it was only for the blind, or only for the hearing impaired is silly. Shame on you all, and dumb move by any companies R&D department that walks away from it. What helps someone read a screen today, gets incorporated in to your cell phone tomorrow for the sighted that simply want to be more efficient or the just motivationally challenged.

It is also one of the really practical areas of AI, things like voice recognition, and so on.

The big opertunity that is being missed I believe is that something like 45% of Americans will be over 55 by 2012 (I might have stat a bit backwards), and that means gobs and gobs of money that can provide IT technology to the disabled. A large portion of the American population is going to be in that category shortly. It might very well be the new .com bubble of the next 10 years, to those that can appreciate the problem early. Sadly, I don't see a whole lot of that going on yet, but it will come.

My hats off and full support to anyone working in that field, regardless of who your end target it is. My predication is that your going to wake up one morning very rich not too long from now.

And in the afternoon

[Anonymous Coward]

CEO Ellison decided to pass the time by pushing a few wheelchair users down staircases while he was at it. -_-

Re:Agree

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess was the same...

http://www.kidud.co.il

gnome != Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry folks , but these are NOT "the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. " but just
"the most important contributors to the GNOME accessibility tools. "

GNOME != Linux.
There's KDE, XFCE Fluxbox and plenty others.

Two developers doesn't imply problems

[seawall]

but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.

I don't really understand this. I do assume "for all time" is hyperbole.

Important, popular, projects where most of the work is by one or two developers are common.

Example: UW-IMAP (At least until recent UW budget cuts). Most used imap implementation on the planet?

Example: troff, the original little-commented PDP-11 assembly language version. It was tense for those who depended troff to write manuals, dissertations or books when the developer died.

Example: TeX

Example: Macintosh Window Clipping

Example: Trumpet Winsock (DOS/Early Windows TCP/IP)

Example: 4K Micro-soft [sic] BASIC

Re:Lawyers at work...

[sproketboy]

And Oracle doesn't?

Standard FLOSS answer:

[DaveV1.0]

Well, it is open source so stop whining and get busy coding.

agents of the Devil

[ncmathsadist]

What do you expect out of Larry Ellison????

f5g acronyms

[hoggoth]

"This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work"

I h2e f5g s4d a6s!

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I don't think desktops are their priority right now and thus that is reflected in the staffing changes. They probably looked at what they were getting and made the changes based on that. sri

Anybody ask Willie?

[jgarry]

Willie did blog about why he does this

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody pays for this kind of thing out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a public-ly traded company..

Which is a non-sequitur. Publicly traded companies do "goodness" stuff all the time: check out how much money (and time) big corporations spend on community projects (say, Target, Mickey D or almost any company from Fortune's 100 best companies to work for). They do it because, gee, they can, and their owners and/or employees want to. And it can of course be good for business. Much of that is not ONLY due to their benevolence, but much of it actually is.

It is rather ignorant to suggest that just because company is owned by shareholders, it precludes any possibility of corporate entities actually wanting to do Good Stuff, above and beyond their legal minimum requirements.

Re:Lawyers at work...

[thetoadwarrior]

Good for them. If the handicap benefit from Sun getting the government to use a more secure OS then I fail to see the problem.

OOo *is* plagued with flaws

[zooblethorpe]

I'm no MS lover -- I've lost many an hour due to their pointless mucking about with the UI and other functionality between versions of their products, and I quite loathe how abusive their relationship with their customers is. (By the same token, it takes two to tango, but anyway...)

That said, I must also say that OpenOffice.org has been an amazing disappointment in various and sundry ways. Despite the considerable *potential* of the project, there are so many ways in which it falls completely flat. Assorted bugs that may present substantial barriers to adoption for more serious use remain unfixed, some for 5, 6, 7, even *8* years, sometimes with no indication of any progress and despite being theoretically trivial to implement (and despite sometimes being implemented in IBM's OOo-derived Lotus Symphony suite): [1], [2], [3]...

By any objective measure, the OOo development process has been poorly managed. I seem to recall an article here on Slashdot some months back that characterized OOo project management as "moribund", but I cannot find the link at the moment. The fact remains that other office software applications, some FOSS and some proprietary, have progressed by leaps and bounds (though, in MSO's case, perhaps simply "changed" as opposed to "progressed", YMMV) over the past almost-decade, while OOo has been largely dead in the water.

I've followed OOo since I learned of it some time before the 1.0 release, and I've gone from enthusiastic supporter and interested contributor to the fora, to a disaffected and disillusioned (though still hopeful) former user. As a Japanese-English translator, I need accurate word and character counts, which OOo still hasn't implemented. I know this makes me something of a fringe case, but I am far from alone when I say that I simply cannot use OOo in any real professional capacity.

Oh, well.

Cheers,

Re:Lawyers at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well in Canada it can be a human rights violation if sell goods or provide a service to the public and don't make efforts to make it available to persons with disabilities. In one well known case a national broadcaster was taken to task for not providing closed captioning and lost.
 
IANAL but there is no reason that I know of for why this law does not apply to software or websites.

Does the USA have a persons with disabilities act? What does it say about software and websites?