GNU's New BLIND Programmer

GNU's New BLIND Programmer

[Chris Hofstader]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks to the help and encouragement I received from people on these lists, T.
V. Raman and Richard Stallman, I can proudly announce that I have joined the
team of programmers working on Project GNU in a full time capacity.  Richard
Stallman and I discussed the issues of blindness and computer usage and have
agreed that it would be valuable to have somone, in this case me, working
exclusively on further enabling free software.  I will not be pulling a
paycheck and will, from time to time, do a little consulting to make a little
extra money.

As most of you know, T. V. Raman's emacs-speak makes emacs, the most powerful
computer program ever written, into an operating environment which is nearly
ideal for the blind user.  My work will be to further the cause of accessible
free software.  Without Raman, my work would not be possible and I am
tremendously grateful for his great program.

It has also occured to me that virtually everyone on the blinux-list refers to
their operating environment as "Linux".  In reality, only the kernel, less
than 10% of the source code on a Linux distribution CD is "Linux".  The vast
majority of the programs run in this environment are from Project GNU. 
Emacs-speak could not exist without emacs, a GNU program; it can run
successfully without Linux (on DEC UNIX, Sun OS and other unix variations).

Project GNU is run by the Free Software Foundation.  Much of the GNU software
is written by volunteers but FSF has a number of programmers in its emply. 
Maintaining this large system is costly, even though the paid staff works for
activist wages, substantially less than market rates for programmers.  If you
use GNU software, I urge you to send a contribution to FSF so they can
continue the important work they are doing.  Any amount of money would be
gratly appreciated and would go to further this important cause.

There are many reasons why free software is the best solution for the blind
user.  I won't go into them here as many of you already know this and would be bored.

Glad to be hacking again,
cdh