Oracle Lays Off Accessibility Leader
The leader of the Gnome accessibility team, Will Walker, has until now worked for the Accessibility Program Office from Sun, which after the Oracle take-over melted into the relevant APO at Oracle.
As Walker writes on the Orca mailing list, from now on he will be working on the Gnome project's accessibility ambitions and on Orca in his spare time only, and depending on his new job, might have to give up the work completely. In an open letter to Oracle, Joanmarie Diggs, who works on the screen reader Orca from the Accessibility Program Office, has expressed her concern about the future of the Gnome A11y team.
"I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to continue this work, the accessibility of the Gnome desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail. Oracle's decision threatens to leave many individuals with disabilities around the world without access to a modern desktop environment. I find that tragic."
Issue 201/2017
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
GitHub Announces Open Source Friday Program
They encourage people to take time out and work on open source projects on Friday.
-
System76 Announces Their Own Distro, Pop!_OS
Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu and uses the Gnome stack.
-
Linus Torvalds Talks About His Motivation
He never tires of working on the Linux kernel.
-
Debian 9 Stretches Its Wings
The new release of Debian has a very strong focus on security.
-
Trojan Turns Raspberry Pi into a Cryptocurrency Mining Device
Two trojans in the wild are targeting Linux machines.
-
Fedora 26 Beta Comes with New Features
The workstation comes with the latest Gnome desktop environment and support for many application build systems.
-
Raspberry Pi Foundation Merges with CoderDojo Foundation
The two foundations join forces to expand their efforts to reach young people.
-
Samba Security Hole Patched but Risk is Bigger
Millions of devices that use Samba Server are vulnerable to attacks.
-
Red Hat Announces OpenShift.io
Red Hat takes its IDE online.
-
Microsoft Bakes Linux into Windows Server
Microsoft is slowly becoming a Linux vendor.