> Hank asked: does that mean orca will die in linux to? cdh replies:
The beauty of free software like orca versus proprietary software like JAWS (for instance) is that although Sun Microsystems has led the orca development, virtually any hacker or group thereof can take the source and continue the project. The nation of Brazil has elected to standardize all of its government owned and operated computing devices on free, GNU/Linux operating systems. They have two major reasons: the first, they fear that Apple and/or Microsoft may have built in some code into Windows and OSX to spy for the American government. Given the human rights record demonstrated by Yahoo and others spying for the Chinese government, why not think that the two biggest OS vendors may be helping out Uncle Sam? With the GNU/Linux OS, they have every line of source code and their own security personnel can go through one line at a time and make sure no such code exists before the Brazilian secrets show up at Fort Mead. The second reason is price. A GNU/Linux distribution will run pretty nicely on a clunky, single core, 32 bit used Dell; Snow Leopard and Windows 7 require pretty hefty hardware to be used effectively. The orca question comes in as Brazil has laws regarding people with disabilities that are far stronger than our wimpy ADA and their laws include explicit language about technology. So, while Sun is organizing the project, Brazil and other nations are contributing hackers to the project to help keep it moving forward. There are a number of other governments making similar decisions for similar reasons - after our government got caught spying on Americans, all credibility that we were not spying on everyone else flew out the window and closed and complicated technology is in the James Bond book of tricks. Those of us who get to use Macintosh and even Windows with our screen reader of choice really need to realize just how fortunate we are. I spend a fair amount of time in Ubuntu with orca and, often, emacspeak. The latter is highly stable and crusty old farts like me still remember a large portion of the complex emacs keystroke catalogue. Orca does a not bad job in a few high profile programs but, because few developers are coding to the gnome standard and, therefore, few programs support the excellent gnome accessibility API, orca gets a lot less "for free" than Macintosh or Windows. For we who write programs or test systems on GNU/Linux platforms, it is pretty good as it has fully accessible tools fart in excess of anything Mac or Windows offer. For most others who need orca, though, it is a bit clunky and often unstable. I'd love to suggest that we all walk away from the world of proprietary software but, developing for niche audiences like us blinks fails to meet the critical mass necessary to sustain a world of free software hackers like the server tools, Apache, etc. So, while we love to praise Apple and boo Microsoft, they are really the only alternatives for blinks who don't want to spend a whole lot of time fixing their environment. cdh --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
