deborah | Entries tagged with old technology

In honor of Stallman leaving MIT CSAIL and the Free Software Foundation [1] , I'm unlocking one of the only posts on this journal I've ever made private. Nine years ago, my post "The FSF reminds me of PETA sometimes"[2] was an annoyed response to some comments RMS made about accessibility, in which he basically said that nobody at the FSF should cooperate with any accessibility solution which was not 100% pure and freed of all vile proprietary tools, which (then and now) completely left speech recognition users out in the cold. My post was discovered somehow, and was promptly brigaded by RMS groupies. I locked it down because ain't nobody got time for that.

I'm unlocking it now, because I want to remind folks that RMS has always been a complete shitheel. (I know, he has been a lot worse to this, to a lot of people, for an exceedingly long time. This was just the example I have in my pocket.)

Some gems I didn't call out in the original post include:

In response to a request that any FLOSS accessibility solution enable the economic independence of disabled people so they can choose free software willingly: "the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."

It would only be "ethical for you to use NaturallySpeaking if your main activity were working directly towards replacing it."

His claim "For several years I had bad hand pain and mostly could not type. I did not even consider using a nonfree dictation program, because nonfree software would take away my freedom", which completely glosses over his actual solution at the time: he paid a high school student to type for him. Silly me, relying on proprietary software all these years when I could just call up MIT and get them to pay a kid to type for me.

This entire message, which I urge you to read in full, especially if you want to hate Stallman with the passion of a thousand fiery suns but don't want to think about sex crimes.

And finally, I want to call out the most loathsome quotation from the thread, which I linked in the original post: responding to the comment about inaccessible computers, ""Can't use" is such a strong statement that I wonder if it is another exaggeration, Even if you have no hands, there are other ways to input besides dictation."

I'd also like to call out this comment Synecdochic made to the old post:

I comfort myself with the knowledge that one day he will go away, and the rest of us can get back to the task of making software.

Hear, hear, S.

Notes

Over comments he's made over the years regarding crimes such as Jeffery Epstein's that are frankly too stomach-churning to repeat. [back]

I no longer dislike Microsoft's ecosystem. Nobody else cares fundamentally about desktop accessibility. Microsoft gets countless things wrong but accessibility will always be my killer app. [back]

Along with Anne Sauer and Eliot Wilczek, I've just had a new paper published: "Archival Description in OAI-ORE", in the Journal of Digital Information, a free, green open access journal. This is a version of a paper which we presented last year at Open Repositories 2010, and mercifully, has been greatly improved since the draft of the paper I wrote while running a temperature of 102°.

This paper, by the way, is our attempt to COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZE ARCHIVES AND CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sort of. Revolutionize archival description using new technology, anyway. Changing the laws of physics will have to wait until we get grant funding.

Yesterday, on the DCA blog, I posted "Accessibility and back office archives tools", for which I made a screencast of myself using NaturallySpeaking to use a less-than accessible tool. There was enough positive feedback about the screenreader screencasts to which I linked that I thought there might be some interest in these as well.

In an entirely unrelated aside, when did it become acceptable for un*x programs to start shoving everything -- configuration, logs, state, data -- into /usr/local? (Yes, Tomcat, I'm looking at you.) In my day, whippersnappers, you put your configuration into /etc, your logs into /var/log, your state into /var/run, and your data into whatever was appropriate based on your file system. With obvious modifications based on what operating system you are actually running, maybe using /opt or something instead of /usr/local, etc. In theory, you should be able to get by without even backing up /usr/local, because you could rebuild it completely from source or package, what with all your configuration and state and logs being stored in other places. And as a side effect, it always had a very controllable and knowable size, because it didn't have things like logs that grow arbitrarily if unexpected things happen, and sometimes are exceedingly difficult to roll on a regular basis, and yes, Tomcat, I am still looking at you.

Is this based on a theory of file system management that changed while I haven't been paying attention, or is it just sloppiness based to the new ubiquity of good un*x package management?

I'm grateful to the Free Software movement. I don't deny that the movement, the FSF, and the GNU Project have changed the world for the better. But every time I actually interact with Free Software people, I end up contemplating violence. (Note: I'm distinguishing Free Software from Open Source here; be aware that the link I'm giving here is to a Richard Stallman rant.)

In this thread "A Call to Arms" on the GNU mailing list, Eric Johansson desperately tries to bring sanity to a discussion about enabling Free Software to interact helpfully with proprietary accessibility tools (in this case, Dragon NaturallySpeaking). And time after time, Richard Stallman derails the conversation.

When Johansson tries to explain about the poverty of many people with disabilities, Stallman counters with Billions of people today are too poor to [use computers] and To lack money is unpleasant, but it does not mean you have lost your freedom. (Contrast being broke with being in jail.) When Johansson explains that Free Software is currently something completely unavailable to dictation users, Stallman reports Our goal is to eliminate proprietary software. Towards that end, we have to teach people it is bad. We cannot do that and simultaneously suggest a "solution" that includes NaturallySpeaking -- that is a non-starter here. He thus completely ignores Johansson's larger point, which is that you can't teach people that proprietary software "is bad" if you take away a system that works for them and replace it with one that doesn't.

But the kicker. My God, the kicker:

Responding to Johansson's assertion Let's say I bought into the philosophy. I would get rid of my computer because a free system that I can't use is fundamentally useless, Stallman retorts "Can't use" is such a strong statement that I wonder if it is another exaggeration, Even if you have no hands, there are other ways to input besides dictation.

Sometimes I feel like it's my responsible as both a developer with disabilities and a female developer to speak up in these conversations instead of just lurking. But by all that's holy, that man is poison, and why would I want to be exposed to that kind of poison?

For the record, I hate being tied to Windows. For 10 years I've been on an operating system I despise. I worked on the XVoice project, which has been in a continual cycle of develop-and-stall for years. I would LOVE to be able to be working on non-proprietary software, and this No Compromise attitude is precisely why I can't. So Richard Stallman, if you read this, I want you to realize that YOU are why I'm working on a Windows machine. You are why I can't leave. You are why I use Microsoft Word -- because it's the editor that understands my dictation software. You are why I use Adobe Photoshop instead of the GIMP. You are why I am unable to use the Free Software that I love.

And meanwhile, when Bill Cox asks Will programmers who use Windows and Naturally Speaking, or Windows and JAWs hesitate to join a FSF community? I can only point to this thread in which he asks it as my answer. Will I be willing to speak up and be a voice in the community whose recognized god gets pandered to when he questions the reported adaptive technology needs of another developer? I think the answer is apparent.

This wonderful. The Nebraska Library commission has been making archived copies of Creative Commons published works and cataloging them into their OPAC. They aren't doing this indiscriminately; they are only grabbing works which are in line with their collection development policy. They are also making spiral-bound printed copies of those works for which the license allows it, and shelving them in the physical collection.

What a fabulous, fabulous mashup of old and new.

(And does it say something about my reading habits that I got this link from lisnews and not from boingboing?)

You know what I really love? ImageMagick.

I just started a process creating use JPEG images out of 4000 high-quality TIFFs. One line of bash, and now it will run for a while, and I can go do something else.

*loves*

I may be a librarian now, and I may be a tcsh user in my every day life, but apparently I still can flex my bash-fu when I have to. Yay for line noise!

export j=1;for i in `ls M*.xml`; do k=${foo-`echo $i|cut -f1 -d.`}; mkdir item_$j;cp ${k}.xml item_$j/dublin_core.xml; echo ${k}.jpg>item_$j/contents;cp ../streams/${k}.jpg item_$j;let j++;done

Current Mood: still got it

Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The Australasian Journal of Me

Entries tagged with old technology

RMS has always been an utter tool. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Notes

archival description in OAI-ORE

NaturallySpeaking demonstration

The FSF reminds me of PETA sometimes

libraries 2.0 and 1.0 play awfully nice together

commandline tools: making my life easier every day

dspace's import file format and shell scripting/line noise

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