----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:14
AM
Subject: Re: [g-a-devel] Re:
Gnopernicus on a Live CD?
Hi Thomas, Luke:
The licensing issue is a real shame, but I
don't know of an easy fix
either, especially for the 'Live CD'
However, for the regular Ubuntu distribution I do think that it would
be
worthwhile to include the java-access-bridge, and build
OpenOffice.org
to include the accessibility support.
I've been working on a similar arrangement for Fedora
users, and I can certainly make new rpms of OpenOffice.org and the
java access bridge for rpm based Linux distros.
Which as you might agree it is probably time that rpms for
this stuff becomes easy to obtain and install without compiling this from
source.
The java-access-bridge code and
the OO.o accessibility code is
LGPL, so the licensing issue would then
be reduced to that of a 'soft'
dependency on a non-free JVM -
Which is one reason Mandrake, Fedora, and other
distributions probably don't include the access bridge with their stock
distributions. While the bridge is free the vm is not so they choose not to
include it.
However, at some point interested parties can easily make
spin off distrobutions including this stuff as said.
It sounds like a fair solution to include the
bridge, accessible OpenOffice.org, on our accessible distros and then leave
it to the user to get whatever can not legally be included via license
issues.
there
would be no non-free code bundled. Ubuntu users would
then be able, at
their sole discretion, to independently download and
use the Sun JVM in
order to complete their OpenOffice accessibility
solution.
Well, there are also other alternatives. Such as I know
that Mandrake does not include the java runtime and sdk with their free or
standard releases. However, the Delux version has several goodies like
java included. Obviously, there are ways to license the runtime for
redistrobution and then sell it with a comercial version of
Linux.
If someone was willing to maintain a comercial Linux, "A
Delux version," then I imagine a users could order a cd or dvd set and
have everything included.
Although, I suppose this is
outside of most average Linux users. If I had the time I wouldn't mind
putting my programming skills to use putting out my own
distro.
In the absence of a free alternative, I think this would be a
defensible
approach, and if other agree, it may be worth lobbying for it
with
Debian and/or Ubuntu. Since I work for Sun and wrote much of
the
java-access-bridge for Gnome, perhaps a less-interested party should
do
the lobbying <smile>.
Agreed. It would be nice to get as many Linux distros
onboard, but it would also be nice to see the bridge ship with Solaris.
I recently got to see a Sun desktop running Solaris with
Gnome 2.6 and I rather liked the OS.
The great thing here that we are building with Gnome and
gnopernicus is global accessibility across many Unix and Unix-like operating
systems with a common user interface.
Only a couple of years ago I only had accessibility to
Windows via Jaws and some access to Linux with speakup. Now, thanks to
gnopernicus I have used FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux all with the same screen
reader, desktop, and apps.
regards
Bill
Thomas Ward
wrote:
>Hi,
>While I think everyone can agree adding a Java
VM and java access bridge
>would be a good thing there are licensing
issues that would have to be
>resolved first.
>
>
>
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