Re: [orca-list] You all're gonna think I'm stupid, but, I need help with Gnome-Speech

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
> Call me crazy but, I'm of the opinion that stuff should not be
> deprecated unless that which is replacing it is equal to or better
> than that which is replaces.  Anything else flies in the face of
> progress.  Those same people who decided to deprecate Gnome speech
> should have seen to it that speech dispatcher was going to do as
> good a job for all users as its predecessor before phasing it out.

It was Gnome that decided to deprecate Corba/Bonoobo. Orca either had to
remove Gnome-Speech or rewrite it to use Corba. The former option was chosen,
for justifiable reasons. It was the right decision.

> This way those of us mortals without the wherewithall to "scratch"
> our proverbial itches wouldn't be left out in the cold while those
> who can improve product functionality make statements like:  "I
> could fix it but, I don't want to because *I* don't need it."  If I
> went and installed Linux at my business and made it our standard
> operating system for all my employees and had something phased out
> without something that replaced it with equal functionality, I'd be
> upset.  This is why Linux will never truly be mainstream.  

Businesses that depend on Linux and which don't have the technical expertise
to improve or customize it generally buy long-term support contracts from
vendors who do. They also tend to run "enterprise" releases which are upgraded
much more slowly than what most people on this list appear to be running.

As for "mainstream", that's an entirely different discussion which I'd rather
not enter into at this point, except to say that there are views according to
which Linux can be successful without ever becoming attractive to large
numbers of non-technical end-users, and that whether or not it should become
"mainstream" in this sense is likely to be a controversial question. Mozilla
is a good comparison here: the Mozilla foundation have explicitly said that
whereas they want Firefox to become the best browser that they can make, they
don't aim to dominate the browser "market" - that's simply not the goal of the
project.