I fully agree with Orna on this. This is against the FOSS spirit. If at all, the government should be supplying the deaf with the tools to transcribe audio when needed (in the US they do via "relay calls"). A free software approach to this issue would be similar to what project guntenberg uses (http//www.pgdp.org/) which is cutting the work to small peices for volunteers to work on, WITHOUT limiting access to the originals. However, even this may not be cost effective. The community as a whole will benefit more from these volunteers' time if they would have contributed in other means, such as writing software or localization, which outweighs Omer Zak's personal wishes to hear a lecture.
"Discrimination" is not a problem here. There will always be people for which the information will not be accesible, say people who don't know English, or people who do not have a programming background. Alon On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Orna Agmon wrote:
Hi Omer, You suggest limiting the availability of recorded lectures until transcribed. This witholding of information will only cause the recorded lectures to be made available through other channels rather than the official one, because information will leak. Also, at the cost of making sure that the deaf have the lecture transcribed quickly, you suggest delaying it for many others. You suggest forcing people who want to listen to the lecture to "pay" by transcribing it, while this is not their itch at all. This is completely against the spirit of free software. You know I have volunteered in the past to trnascribe meetings for you (from which others have enjoyed as well), but I personally refuse to be forced to "volunteer". Even if I refuse to volunteer to transcribe, you already plan for me as [EMAIL PROTECTED] the job of dividing a lecture into tiny tidbits, spreading the work to volunteers and assembling it together, if I get your idea correctly. My work on Haifux, as well as my work on Hamakor, is all volunteer work as it is, and this means doing about 20 times work per lecture as I do today. You say you "have a life" and does not have time to put in effort for this cause (for example by writing the software to do it). Splitting the work among athoer people does not make the work less, rather the opposite, it has an overhead. We are not talking about donating free computer cycles like [EMAIL PROTECTED], but about forcing actual people to volunteer. It is like saying that every person can give 10 shekels, in order for one person to be really rich. Obviously, you cannot do the manual work you suggest yourself. However, this case is similar to the case where a person does not have the ability to make a software change him/herself, because (s)he cannot program. In this case, the obvious solution is to pay a programmer for this service. Many FOSS - supporting companies make their living like this. You compare the accesability of a volunteer site or a volunteer organization like Haifux with the accesability of a public building. You compare the transcription to having an elevator, which is the right of those who cannot climb stairs to have. This comparison is misleading, since when a building is built, and especially out of tax money or using a government permit for a public place (like a cinema), this building has a budget. Caring for those who cannot climb stairs means allocating a part of this budget towards this purpose. Haifux does not have a budget, so demanding hours of work is inappropriate. I agree that you have a case when we are talking about organizing an event with budget. But demanding "volunteer" work just does not work. Orna. -- Orna Agmon http://ladypine.org/ http://haifux.org/~ladypine/ ICQ: 348759096 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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