Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility 220
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).
Re:*Physically disabled* (Score:0, Informative)
Section 508 still holds (Score:3, Informative)
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:*Physically disabled* (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Insightful!? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bad title (Score:5, Informative)
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:Oracle DB (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure I'm missing some things - those were off the top of this Oracle DBA's head. Here [oracle.com] 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 (Score:4, Informative)
That's actually something they just added in 8.4. [postgresql.org] I wrote a little bit about using this functionality on my blog [storytotell.org]. The syntax is different than Oracle's though.
Re:Oracle DB (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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. [blogspot.com] 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 [refractions.net] is so capable. And please note they just announced a major new release. [refractions.net]
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.