Augury and reading chicken bones for profit... (was Pun-ditry...)

[Fairlight]

At Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 06:55:29PM -0400 or thereabouts, 
suspect John Esak was observed uttering:
> Quite a strange explanation for "close-of-business"...

And initially -I- read it as he wanted to be rid of both in-house by the
end of 2005--as in migrate away from them entirely.

> When and if Linux systems ever write strong enough underpinnings and
> foundations for their software that such as screen readers could work...
> maybe then I'll start looking more closely at it. On the whole, I still view
> Linux as a toy for developers and a hell of an OS for small control system
> chips.

The underpinnings are just fine.  It's a dearth of applications software
that's the problem.  That's vastly improved in the time span since 1993, or
even 2000.  But it's still the major obstacle to full-fledged adoption in
anything but server and embedded markets--meaning the desktop, mainly.

However, Apple had this problem with Macintosh for a long time.  Software
for Mac, even identical in features to 'doze (or superior--MS Word for Mac
4.0 is -still- the best WP I've ever used) has always been far more
expensive, just as *nix versions of WordPerfect were about 3x the cost.

It's not that the OS can't handle a screen reader, per say.  It's just that
nobody's written one for it yet.  But people do neat things, so there's
always hope.  I remember trying out a voice recognition package whose
underlying library was planned to be rolled into a major shell at some
point.  That was in about '96.  Don't think it ever happened, but the basis
was there.

Mostly it's funding issues.  People either write things to make money off
of it, which is fine IMHO, contrary to what Stallmanites would say (most of
which don't -have- to earn a living off their software), or they do it in
their spare time as a hobby.  That's where most of the OSS stuff comes
from.  What we -need- to do is gather a group of visually impaired
programmers willing to take on the job--they have the skills -and- the
incentive.  That, or wait until one of the player companies sees a
reasonable enough desktop market share to bother investing in R&D for
porting their software.  That won't happen for at least another 30
percentage points, I'd wager.

mark->
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