Open SOurce and where its used for the blind person

[Eric Oyen]

ok, the previous thread I am involved in got me to thinking where linux (and linux ported apps) get used. Well for starters, lets try my macbook.
I have several command line utilities that are in the macports repository. These were originally coded to work in linux and were patched to do the same thing here. One such app is PDF2HTML. It converts hard to read PDF to HTML so that it can be displayed in a web browser. It works pretty well, except for scanned image format PDF files. I have another linux OCR program for that.

now, I am also a ham radio operator. This means I need to be able to use my radio while blind. Not so easy, you ask? actually, its pretty hard without the tools. There are some 20 different apps for ham radio in any linux repository. One is HamLib. It has a nifty little app called rig control. With that while running Linux from here, I can control almost every aspect of my kenwood HF radio. This is nice because it allows me to set frequency, mode, power level, mic gain, DSP filters split frequency operations and the like. There are also programs designed to decode various digital/data modes from over the air and I use them all frequently.

There are also office apps which I can use on either windows or linux that are open sourced. Libre Office is a complete suite that does everything that MS office does. It also runs leaner than MS Office on windows.

The screen reader NVDA (as mentioned above) is used by me when in windows. Its fast, stable and useful for the blind computer specialist.

There are database servers, email servers, open directory servers and complete server farms for rendering animation that all run on linux. eBay Inc. uses some 39,000 Linux servers (both as hardware hosts and also virtual machines) to handle a great many tasks eBay is one of the largest users of linux outside of the NSA (and perhaps even google).

So, if the government decides that linux needs to be made illegal, they are going to have to deal with the crushing impact on the economy, the protests from the disabled and, of course, the entire open source community. What was it one of our founding fathers wrote? "Vigilance is the eternal price for maintaining liberty" or something to that effect.

-eric