Frankencode

As many of you may have heard, from blogs by Eitan, Mike and Joanie, as well as an e-mail to the gnome-foundation-lists by Fernando, the Gnome a11y community is having a tough time.

I have been interacting with the a11y community for over two years now, and in that time the funding situation has never looked good. I do not wish to insult or demean companies that are no-longer involved in funding Gnome a11y. Companies and individuals have their own priorities that they must follow. Work they have done in the past on Gnome is very much appreciated by me, even if they cannot continue that work in-to the future.

That said, I believe that in the past two and a half years Gnome a11y has lost a huge amount of funding. First from IBM, which, to many peoples dismay, pulled out of a11y funding before I started work on AT-SPI. I was glad to hear that Mozilla is providing $10,000 to the Gnome foundation for a11y work. I’m extremely grateful for that, but I do not believe that Mozilla are providing the level of funding that they have done in the past. Our work on AT-SPI D-Bus has been funded jointly by Codethink, Sun, and another un-named benefactor. None of this funding is likely to continue past the end of February. All of this would seem slight were it not for the news that Oracle have let-go of important Gnome a11y community members working for the Sun Accessibility Project Office. Sun have been the major contributor to Gnome a11y, and this is a worrying signal that Oracle do not intend to continue the current level of contribution.

Assuming that Oracle do not wish to involve themselves in Gnome a11y, my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that we may have lost greater than $200,000 in anual funding over the last three years.

Although huge amounts of Gnome development takes place un-funded, by hackers, volunteers, users and hobbyists you would probably be surprised how much is done by folks working a 9-5. I don’t expect the figures to be the same, but as an example, 75% of kernel developers are paid by corporations for their work. The loss of the Sun Accessibility Project Office and other sources of funding will be felt very heavily by the Gnome a11y community.

Accessibility is incredibly important to the Gnome project, and not only to its users. Gnome has a fantastic, credible, accessibility story. This, to me, marks Gnome out as a class ‘A’ open-source project. Were we to lose this, it would be a turning point. In my eyes Gnome would then be a project in decline.

What can we do?

Firstly we need to go on a cohesive search for funding. The Linux Foundation has an accessibility group that I have been involved in for a long time. This seems to me the best place to combine our efforts in the great funding drive. Funding channeled through the Linux Foundation would not be Gnome specific, but cross desktop a11y technology is what we have long been striving for.

Ideally enough funding would be found to hire someone to work full time on Linux Desktop accessibility.

Outside of the search for cash all Gnome developers need to spend more time on accessibility. Its not always easy to make ones application accessible, and I’m sure it can seem daunting. There are still a11y community members ready to help out though. All is not lost. I’m damn near certain that we are going to pull together. Gnome 3.0 will have the same great accessibility that has made me proud of past Gnome releases.

Rob and I took a trip to Grenoble this week for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe meeting. All-in-all a very good couple of days for us. We showed off our research project (daily-catchup) in the demo room on Friday afternoon and got to attend some fantastic talks. Travelling wasn’t so much fun though. Somehow we managed to take 12 hours getting from Manchester to Grenoble. The two pervasive themes at the conference seemed to be boot-time reduction and android.

Rob and Jon have a natter

Jon Masters gave a very good Keynote on Porting Linux. Very interesting to me, Jon gave a great overview of some new things going on in kernel land.

Matt Porter debunks android myths.

The prize winning talk at the conference was entitled “Myth-busters: Android”. Matt Porter talked about his team’s experiences porting android to the Power and MIPS architectures.  It seems that android is not yet a mature technology. Much of the code is ARM specific. Having replaced nearly all of the user-land stack, there is a-lot of configurability and features missing from a more standard linux distribution. I shall endeavour to get hold of the slides so that you can all form your own opinion. For me it was an eye-opener as to just how different android is.

Rob's spin of android fail.

This is the lovely face Rob had immediately after the android talk. If I had to para-phrase the conversation it would be: “Look what they did to our beloved stack”. (Ignored it completely)

The android BOF later in the day helped us all to see some of the really good parts of android. It gave me the feeling that as the platform and community around it matures we will all be able to work with a really great open source product. Just expect a-lot of re-training and re-adjusting along the way.

Rob demonstrates daily-catchup.

We demonstrated our daily-catchup research over lunch. The demo table was well attended. Rob and I got to talk about the javascript, vala, tracker, clutter and MVC wizardry that goes into daily-catchup. Its a rich-gui social networking application intended for disconnected operation.

Codethink and the Monta-vista massive.

Tasty dinner on the final evening of the conference. Somehow Rob and I found ourselves out with the Monta-Vista massive. They are a great bunch and made for a wonderful last night in Grenoble.

For a more detailed overview of the conference itself see the free electrons blog.

Its been a long time coming, but about a fortnight ago we did the first release of AT-SPI2, the D-Bus port of our Linux accessibility framework. As mentioned in the notes the release had a warning label.

‘DANGER: Development release - may cause psychological harm’

Overall though I’ve been very pleased with the work we’ve achieved so-far. I have not been funded to work on the project for six months now, but I’ve found time to fix a few bugs, and most importantly help out those who want to get involved. I never really believed Linus “Release early, release often”, but it turns out that he  was right. Since the software has had an official release we’ve had a good number of people providing patches and generally poking at it.

Thanks go to Mario Lang, Stephen Shaw, Halim Sahin and others who have tried things out. Its been extremely useful. Mario especially finding a couple of serious bugs.

We still have a long way to go, but the end has been in sight ever since the hack-fest in Dublin. We need to get the cspi port up-to-date, help Mike Gorse work through the issues regarding reference count removal and fix bugs, lots of bugs. With EDS quickly shifting to D-Bus Gnome is well on the way to ORBit removal. A11y and GConf shouldn’t be far behind.

Thank-you to Felix Kaser for pointing out Mark Shuttleworth’s interview with derStandard.at. It was an incredibly interesting read. While at the GCDS this year I made many guesses about the Ubuntu opinion on Gnome Shell and the plans for 3.0. They, as the largest distributor of a consumer linux desktop, have the most to lose or gain from the awesome 3.0 plans.

The part of the interview that struck me directly was Mark’s opinion on what is missing from our proposals:

“Well initially there was a lot of discussions about something that was much less visual which is how files are organized and I even blogged about it. I think actually that could be a bigger  improvement in the every-day user experience of the GNOME desktop”

I don’t know about Mark, but I was surrounded by people who are desperate to solve this type of problem at GCDS. Rob Taylor & Philip Van Hoof were both present and really pushing tracker as a a usable, fast data-store for desktop metadata. I attended Thursdays ontology BoF with the two of them. Mark is right, this is generally an unsexy problem. People who missed the ‘Nature of e-mail containers’ conversation on Thursday afternoon avoided the GCDS nadir of boredom.

The real problems of how we present this to our users is still to come, and its much more difficult than providing a fast data-store or getting consensus on what the meta-data should look like. Still, its the sexy, exciting part where we should be able to get everyone involved. Mark may be surprised by how many at Codethink and elsewhere in the community are working on replacing the awful file-system metaphor for data organization. Obviously we haven’t done enough to get his attention yet, but that could change soon. (Small secret) Codethink should be putting resources into a demo app over the coming months for the purpose of showing off some cool new technologies, including the new Tracker. Wait for a blog post from Rob Taylor for the full details.