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''Helen Keller Achievement Award'' credits GNOME Accessibility

Submitted by stro on Wed, 2002-09-11 14:58. Gnome Accessibility

Bill Haneman writes:
I am delighted to relay the news that the "GNOME Accessibility
Architecture" has been singled out in this year's "Helen Keller
Achievement Award in Technology", one of the annual "Helen Keller
Awards" presented by the American Foundation for the Blind.

These awards recognize the "notable accomplishments of individuals who
are role models or improve the quality of life for people who are blind
or visually impaired." According to a pre-press release, the GNOME
Accessibility architecture demonstrates a committment to accessible
technology which "raises the bar for the computing industry" and
"dramatically expands the options available" for technology consumers
who are blind or visually impaired.

Although the award is officially being awarded to Sun Microsystems for
its "leadership in universal design", it is the work of GNOME
Accessibility that is specifically called out by the award presenters.

Pat Sueltz, Executive Vice President of Sun Services, will be on hand to
accept the award, and I know that like all of us at Sun, she
acknowledges that credit for this project lies not only with the
executives who have remained committed to 'equal access', but with a
distributed engineering effort including many organizations and
individuals. I am sure that Pat will accept the award on behalf of all
the people, many of them volunteers, who are working to make GNOME
Accessibility a reality.

Though the current AFB press release does not highlight the community
aspects of the GNOME accessibility effort, we will endeavor to make this
point in upcoming public announcements, drawing attention to the many
individuals and organizations who share credit for making GNOME
Accessibility what it is today, and who are striving to bring it from
"framework" to "desktop reality" over the coming months.

In particular we would like to thank the engineers in Ximian, RedHat,
CodeFactory, BAUM, the University of Toronto, the Mozilla project, and
the many individuals on the Release Team and Foundation who have
supported our work; the intrepid individuals who have put both time and
system-stability on the line to test and develop on an evolving
platform; the members of kde-accessibility, Free Desktop Accessibility
Working Group (fdawg), and mozilla-accessibility mailing lists, and many
individuals and organizations involved in assistive technology
development.

Best regards, and congratulations and thanks to all.

-Bill

Please give credit to the Free Software movement for GNOME

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2002-09-16 17:00.

It's just good that the Open Source community can help people with disabilities.

GNOME was started by the Free Software movement to provide a Free Software alternative to KDE which, at the time, was not Free Software. Your mention of the other movement is poignant in this thread because the Open Source movement does so much to try and draw attention away from the freedoms of Free Software. Please give credit where credit is due. And credit is not due to the Open Source movement here.

I haven't seen screaming by any Open Source organization anyway.

Much of what the Open Source movement does is renaming (or "repurposing" to use the modern lingo) other people's work, no matter how ill the fit might be. The GNU GPL is a perfect example of this: that license was born from concerns about software freedom and it talks explicity about software freedom. The Open Source movement was set up to never talk about freedom. The Open Source movement was set up to actively dismiss software freedom because freedom-talk gets in the way of the Open Source movement's goals. The message of Free Software is aimed at all computer users. The message of the Open Source movement is aimed chiefly at businesses.

For an example of OSI's belligerancy, try reading the Open Source Initiative's FAQ entry about the difference between the Open Source movement and the Free Software movement. This FAQ entry is glib, uninsightful, and it uses name-calling to make its point. Now compare that to the well-reasoned response the Free Software Foundation offers about these two movements.

Consider the times when people talk about Free Software as "Open Source" even though they are discussing efforts which are explicitly described by their authors as "Free Software". You just did this in your post (the parent article to this post). Eric Raymond's actions toward RMS, the OSI FAQ entry on Free Software, and the frequency with which Open Souce movement advocates try to claim the work of Free Software movement advocates all make me see how exclusionary and belittling the Open Source movement is (and conversely how idiosyncratic, polite, and consistent the Free Software movement is).

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