Open Source Who?

I was in this high-level meeting and we were focusing on accessibility; a lot of good work has been done by Free/Open-Source software people in this space, but the story still isn’t as good as it needs to be. So I got up on my pulpit and ranted away about how we need to do more evangelism and get the word out that accessibility is everyone’s issue and should be on everyone’s agenda. One of the businesspeople said “Well yes, but management at Sun and Novell and IBM are all on board and will put resources in, so aren’t we OK?” I was silenced for a moment; among other things because the statement wasn’t obviously nuts. I mean, it’s nice that the economic mainstream takes F/OSS seriously, and I’m real happy to be working for a company that’s in the middle of that. But I’m used to a world where F/OSS priorities are about what the geeks are interested in working on, not what management is willing to fund. And this could be serious. Way back when, I suspect that management wouldn’t have been that interested in a MINIX replacement for the 386, or a patchy Web server, or programming languages named after jewels and snakes. I’m optimistic that the good ideas will get worked on anyhow, because few forces are stronger than a good engineer in the grip of a good idea. But still, the world is changing (as always) out from under us.