Re: [orca-list] possibly OT: Oracle takeover

[Anthony Sales <tony sales rncb ac uk>]

Obviously everyone is shocked by the news and it will be particularly disturbing for Wille who has lost his 
source of income and a project he enjoyed working on. It seems very short sighted of Oracle to do this - I do 
know someone else who works on accessibility at Oracle and I will contact him to see if he knows anything 
more about it etc. I am sure that Willie will found another job in the near future, but there is no guarantee 
it will be on accessibility. So in the meantime we need to unite on one strategy to petition Oracle and/or 
try to get Willie another Job. So what do you recommend we do Willie? Set up an online partition or e-mail 
oracle directly? Please advise. Then there is the question of what happens if Willie isn't able to work on 
Orca anymore - we need to discuss as a community what the way forward is, identify possible developers who 
have the skill and time to do this. Again maybe Willie has some suggestions?

Finally, although I may be being pessimistic, I think this is yet another demonstration that the 'big 
players' do not take accessibility that seriously, and we will always be playing catch-up and fighting with 
fancy graphical/audio features introduced in mainstream distributions, and maybe this supports my personal 
view that it would be better if all of the developers working ion accessibility worked on producing a VI 
distro together rather than all adding small contributions to mainstream projects. But I am not trying to 
start any arguments and will support what ever strategy the community decide upon  to the best of my limited 
ability.

Anyway can I suggest we start a thread now on the Orca mailing list with the Subject title: Orca - 
suggestions for the future!

Finally this would be an ideal opportunity for Canonical to demonstrate they take accessibility seriously by 
snapping up Willie as fast as they can!

drbongo

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Aaruni
Sent: 06 February 2010 11:12
To: hackingKK
Cc: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] possibly OT: Oracle takeover

Hi will and all, there cannot be 2 thoughts on what a great service
orca has done for accessibility to the blind and partially sighted. I
am really dumstruck as to what I can say. Orca means so much to all of
us that we must do whatever possible to sustain this project and let a
true accessibility be everybody's realised dream. If anybody decides
to put up an online petition I'll do my best to muster as many
signatures as possible. Orca means a whole real world to the VI
community of the developing countries.
I sincerely pray that things remain the same for the core developers
of orca with heftier pay packets from the new company.
Regards,
Aruni.

On 06/02/2010, hackingKK <hackingkk gmail com> wrote:
> On Friday 05 February 2010 04:17 AM, Willie Walker wrote:
> > Hi Igor:
> >
> > I'm now working on Orca and leading the GNOME Accessibility project in my
> > spare time.
> >
> > Will
> >
> > On Feb 4, 2010, at 2:46 PM, Igor Gueths wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Hi all. Just out of curiosity, with Oracle having bought Sun, is anything
> > > going
> > > to change with regards to Orca development? Based on my preliminary
> > > research, it
> > > seems that the MySQL entity will be left relatively intact and
> > > independent. Does
> > > the same hold true in this case? Thanks.
>
>
> I think we can at least make a strong point and put it across to Oracle.
> Things might just remain the same.
>
> Happy hacking.
> Krishnakant.
>
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_______________________________________________
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Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org