[GTALUG] Linux growth (was: Vaccination Receipts on Linux)

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Mon, 20 Sept 2021 at 08:43, Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:


> It's deeply unfortunate, but accessibility only moves forward through the
> threat of legal action. The US Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has
> teeth, but who can be sued for Linux?
>

That goes to one of the largely unspoken but very real deficiencies of open
source, in that the world of end-users is beholden to the projects that
will scratch the itch of developers. This is why the open source world has
dozens of text editors and thousands of Linux distributions but has yet to
tackle decent OCR (which would be a significant accessibility tool). There
are exceptions, of course, but doing something that end users want more
than developers requires external incentives.

It would take a sponsor to fund developers to create (and make useful)
something that developers would not use but would be useful to society at
large. This usually requires either employers or benefactors. If the will
really existed, someone could establish a foundation that would fund
development of FOSS accessibility tools, defining specific projects,
fundraise towards them, hire developers and then project-manage. Some of
the most successful examples that come to my mind of this are actually in
the font world, which have led to the wonderful fonts Gentium (best Unicode
support) <https://software.sil.org/gentium/> and Lexend (scientifically
tested for maximum readbility) <https://www.lexend.com/>, both of which are
arguably improvements in accessibility.

In many open source projects, foundations are formed to support
already-successful software (Apache, Drupal, etc). There aren't enough
examples of the foundation coming first and "commissioning" projects that
are needed but not commercially viable.

- Evan
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