[Accessibility] AT Device Shared I/O

[Janina Sajka]

Since we're about 90-minutes away from our teleconference call, let me
ask the most important question I can think of about this topic ...

Do we need to resolve this discussion in order to complete the FSG102
document?

Bearing in mind that the document represents consensus among us, perhaps
we do. But, perhaps we can agree on what needs to be done without
determining all of the conditions under which the results are made
available?

IIt seems to me that the former means we will not finish in time to
forward FSG102 to the FSG Board on Monday.

So, this is the threshold question, imho.

Thoughts anyone? 

Doug Beattie writes:
> From: Doug Beattie <dbb at linkexplorer.com>
> 
> Bill:
> 
> Re:
> 
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 11:20:30AM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 20:45, Janina Sajka wrote:
> > > Disadvantage???
> > > 
> > > Some would call that an advantage.
> > 
> > It's a major disadvantage in a library if you wish to standardize on it,
> > and no alternate implementations with other licenses exist.  GPL
> > libraries are the ones that are 'viral' to anything linking to them, and
> > thus they would not be suitable candidates for standardization.
> > 
> > The current legal thinking appears (to my non-expert ears) to be that
> > GPL libraries on a platform are OK under certain circumstances provided
> > they use standard APIs which are also available in non-GPL form.  Most
> > vendors seem to want to bundle both GPL and non-GPL versions with their
> > platform in this case.
> > 
> > This brltty situation has already caused some issues with other braille
> > packages and is something we'd like to see changed for that reason; it
> > limits the usefulness of brltty.
> > 
> > I do think we need to keep these things in mind insofar as we make
> > reference to existing implementations of APIs which we consider for
> > adoption.
> > 
> > - Bill
> >  
> 
> This is a good point you raise on the licensing of standards libraries.
> I am going to also pass this along to the folks doing the general LSB
> work. They too should be thinking about this as well as all groups so
> we allow both commercial as well as non-commercial to build on what
> the standards provide without worry of either losing IP rights or
> having to deal with/provide software that works with proprietary libs.
> Both sides need to be watched out for.
> 
> Doug
> -- 
> Doug Beattie
> dbb at linkexplorer.com

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175