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It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise.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