Oracle Bought Sun; HELP Orca screen reader!

Accessibility
1

Hi folks,

I’m posting this in this forum just to get the message out…

You may have heard that Oracle, the database dudes, bought Sun Microsystems, who along with their Open Solaris were also busy investing in a screen reader for GNOME, the popular Windowing system for Linux.

Gnome is the default windowing system for Ubuntu (the most popular Linux distro currently), Fedora, Open Suse and I’m not sure who else, and has been working with the Mozilla Corp for a long time. Sun had a big push for accessibility with their systems and this translated to work on the Orca screen reader and magnifyer and [url=http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/stable/id2855365.html.en]Braille tty (BRLTTY) system.

The number of developers dedicated to Orca at Sun was 5, and lately it was two: Joanmarie Diggs and Willie Walker.

Oracle has now told them they are no longer needed (so, as of now they are no longer working for Sun or on Orca). It’s unclear if Orca will be abandoned by Oracle or not, but this is rather serious.

I hope people who have heard of Orca and care about it, or accessible Linux (think of developing countries where Linux and Open Source has the ability to offer software to poor people, where it happens blindness and vision problems are more common), or if you
-know any screen reader users who use Linux, or
-know any Python developers who like to work on Open Source projects, or
-know anyone working on Webkit who has interest in Gnome (there is lots of talk about webkit and accessibility being awesome on Macs due to Apple’s pushing but sucking badly on Linux right now)

please spread the word! There needs to be a nice core of developers to keep Orca robust and maintained! Orca is written in Python so Python people with spare time would be awesome.

http://live.gnome.org/Orca

Orca has a lively mailing list: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list

Please help spread the word. As Will Walker states, if nobody says anything or gets the word out, it will be assumed that nobody cares.

2

Joanmarie has posted an open letter to Oracle about this:

http://blog.grain-of-salt.com/index.php?itemid=394

Add your comments!!

3

It shouldn’t be that much trouble, just fork the project to Sourceforge and get a team of developers together to continue it’s development. If there is an active user-base there should be some interest able to be drummed up from the open source community. Ask around the open source communities. :slight_smile:

4

Thanks for that, Stomme poes.

I’ll do my bit to spread this information.

5

It shouldn’t be that much trouble, just fork the project to Sourceforge and get a team of developers together to continue it’s development. If there is an active user-base there should be some interest able to be drummed up from the open source community. Ask around the open source communities.

Unlike many other open source projects, this one spends most of its time debugging other programs more than itself directly. There is a large userbase, but not Python programmers. There’s interest, and there seems to be a campaign to get Wily Walker work at Canonical (who owns Ubuntu) or any of the other Linux distros.

I know Sitepoint isn’t necessarily open source community but it’s part of the Web community so I posted here to spread the word. I almost thought of posting in the Python area but it’s pretty small. I’m also not part of the Python community so I’m hoping those with a foot in over there are spreading the word.

6

Nice to see people getting together to help an open source project like this. One concern I have right now is if Chrome OS starts to take the helm as the leading open source OS. I tried Ubuntu recently, and it is OH SO CLOSE to being as good as windows. I think the Gnome environment is nearly an equal. The bigger problems I have seen are around adobe products being incompatible or difficult to install, as well as difficulties installing closed source drivers. I hope soon these small issues that prevent everyday people from using Linux can be worked out, but at the same time I worry that time is running out.

7

Good point!

8

And so it begins…to stampede the Open Source… this is truly sad. I won’t be surprise at all to pull that move for MySQL. They do say “Oh~ MySQL’s target audience is completely different than Oracle”… to me, this is just blah blah blah… after few yrs…they’ll squash it…after all Oracle is known for their database than anything else.

9

Won’t happen (or affect us), simply because so many businesses and people are dependant on mySQL, if it were dropped by Oracle the open source nature of it would be forked into a fresh project using the existing code (and Oracle won’t be able to prevent it). Simply not an issue whatsoever :slight_smile: