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Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).
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.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
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.
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.
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
cat
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.
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!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
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?
Breakfast served all day!
Yeah, let's stop paying for a public police force. If you can't afford to pay protection, you deserve what you get.
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That explains the hairy feet and ridiculous hats.
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.
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.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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.
It's not like anybody would ever think of such a thing.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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..
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
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.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
If you cannot earn from your passion, you tend to shift your passion somewhere.
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.
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?
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.
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.