Guru गुरु wrote:
Krishnakant Mane wrote:
On
Wednesday 10 February 2010 06:00 PM, Dipendra Manocha wrote:
This is indeed a cause of bug worry. This
was
the real hope and the project
which was bringing confidence of persons with blindness or low vision
in the
open source software.
Thanks
Dipendra
We can still do this.
may be if representatives of other organisations such as redhat or
canonical are reading this, they can step in and save the project.
May be SPI (Software for Public Interest) can be intimated about this
issue.
A massive letter signing campain from visually disabled people or
related organisations can also be taken up to make oracle realise this
problem.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
Dear friends,
sorry for a delayed response on an important issue ...
For a visually impaired person, a screen reader is the basic
requirement to access and participate in the 'information
society'/digital society. Such a basic need has to be seen as an
'entitlement' or a right which society needs to provide for, just as
society provides for education for all (free and compulsory education
is now a law in India), and not as a charity or result of someones
benevolence.
When something becomes an entitlement, it also means that society
(including, though not exclusively, through its main 'development
agency', the Government) has to make
provision to fulfill the entitlement. Just as public schools are
setup/funded
to ensure that all children can indeed exercise their right to
education, 'public software' needs to be created and maintained, to
ensure that
visually impaired can access computers/internet. Public Software thus
means that government has a special responsibility in its provisioning
- it could of course pay technology enterprises to develop it or
develop it in-house. Of course by its very definition, public software
needs to be freely shareable (this freedom is
essential for universal access) and open to customization /
participation by citizens as developers, designers, testers, users etc
(since citizen/community participation is an essential component of
democracy). The four FOSS freedoms
are thus conceptually inherent in public software.
Public Software can thus be seen as a concept to extend FOSS, (at least
that part
of FOSS that is seen as essential to society), and make it a public
(especially Governmental) responsibility. This can help us get out of
the
situation where we need to request Oracle (a private for profit
company) to support Orca development and get into business model
debates. Anything that is a basic entitlement has to be based on more
'funded' models (where public funding takes care of the costs
and
profit margins) and not purely on revenue models (where the
producer expects to
recover costs/make profit through individual sales), for it to be
universally accessible. Operating systems and basic editors of text,
numbers, images, audio-visual documents etc also need to be seen as
public software, that need to be universally accesible. This way, the
government is not allowed to get away by endorsing proprietary software
such as JAWS in its policy documents; developing and making public
software like Orca universally accessible is its own responsibility.
FOSS communities of course need to also have an important role in this
development and provisioning and people who are not technically skilled
to develop software also have important roles in the software
development/maintenance processes as users, designers, testers etc.
Recently UNESCO/ICTD Solution Exchange community, ITfC and couple of
departments within Government of Karnataka
organized a workshop on “Software Principles for the Public Sector,
with focus on Public Education” recently in Bangalore, which discussed
this concept and implications. Many FOSSCOMM members also participated.
The workshop report (as also the
concept note, other resources such as case studies, presentations,
synopses etc etc) are available on www.Public-Software.in
website. We also had a 'Public Software for the Social Sector' workshop
in Jaipur on 25th, that Digantar, Digital Empowerment Foundation,
UNESCO/ICTD Solution Exchange community, Knowledge Commons and ITfC
organized.
LUG Jaipur was also a co-organizer! Thanks to Vivek, Udit and other
LUGJ members
Look
forward to comments on this concept and if we could use its logic in
our current issue on Orca.
regards,
Guru
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