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).
Oracle DB (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
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It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise.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:*Physically disabled* (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Lawyers at work... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Capitalism at work... (Score:3, Insightful)
It might not have been a surprise but it is very unfortunate that Oracle did this.
Re:Capitalism at work... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oracle DB (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Some perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Lawyers at work... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sun was doing this because they hoped it would profit them later one and that is the only reason.
Re:Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
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:*Physically disabled* (Score:5, Insightful)
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* (Score:1, Insightful)
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:Bad title (Score:3, Insightful)
But "drop" is an SQL command, thus, it makes the headline punny.
If there's a need (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Capitalism at work... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:*Physically disabled* (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Business (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Lawyers at work... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:*Physically disabled* (Score:5, Insightful)
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* (Score:4, Insightful)
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* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:*Physically disabled* (Score:1, Insightful)
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* (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Capitalism at work... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is all well and good until you look at what else Oracle are cutting/dropping/lining up to destroy.
Re:Business (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Use Windows 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There is still hope (Score:2, Insightful)
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