Category: Geeks r Us
There are blogs out that are talking about the lawsuit that Freedom Scientific slapped to GW Micro. I posted comments on my blog and so have a few others including GW Micro themselves. Thought I;'d post this in case people do not know about this sad turn of events. What else is new.
Who the hell is surprised by this. FS or proprietary scientific is always wanting to have the upper hand on everything like the little doosh bags that they are. No one should be surprised because look at the trouble we all have to face. Hmmmmm this what happens when we stick these major companies whating to always wanting to be better than the next and it ends of being shit. Hmmm all the more reason to stick with mac or linux. At least we don't have these damned cat fights. Very very childish.
Well, I for one, was surprised about this, so that disproves your statement cody.
I have used both programs, and window-eyes is better I feel. F.S. wants to have a monopoly so they can charge more. There is enough room for both or more screen readers, competition is good, keeps everyone wanting to produce a better product. just my opinions!
that is why nvda is on the rise of becoming as good as jaws or window eyes but it will not put you back almost a grand. can i say "here i come mac in a few years?" I'm just waiting for that voice over to be as good as jaws or better.
and it will happen. i have a vary good feeling on that. fs needs to get the hell over themselves. for christ sake let them use the place marking feature.
I still like my jaws, but i am defanatly having second thoughts now... well we will see how this goes. just for the hell of it, i hope gw micro wins and shows fs you can't have your cake and eat it too.
So, um, why are they suing them? The scripting?
No, they're suing because they violated one of their patents, the one on place markers, I hope GWMicro wins.
What the heck??????????????? They're trying to limit what the other screen reader can do with this? Then there would be no competition! I don't like Window Eyes, but I hope they win!
i hope gw micro wins because if you ask me fs is a ripoff. I have nothing against anybody who uses jaws, just my oppion. I've tried both jaws and window eyes and personally window eyes is the better of the two products.
I've never used Window Eyes, but this whole thing is stupid. I hope they win. Jaws is the only half-decent thing Freedom Scientific has come out with. Note I said half decent because it has its problems too. Everything Freedom Scientific has come out with has been a waste or unstable or both, I mean look at the Pac Mate. So yeah, I definitely hope GW Micro wins, because honestly this is pathetic.
like oh my god! wow, look at the pack mate... its so.... ewww! i hpe they win too, 'cause omg like they're so perfect and like so honest and like, their stuff is still over prized and fully of problems too. Thats ok, though, 'cuz like you know, like all of them are like trying to get into the market and omg... wow. I liek nvda 'cause like omg, its so amazing!!11!! But yeah, this is like omg, totally stupid!
First of all, dez, are you saying that if window eyes has issues that that is half decent.? They all have issues. For example WE is good, however when focus is on the task bar, WE does not read the button, only it says "button". that does not help me at all.
This thing is stupid, again which is why i praise mac. This will eventually turn into a marketting thing. Each comapny will try to make their product even better as they may claim but in reality it is nothing mroe than a marketting ploy. This has already been demonstrated in jaws 9. As most of us know, jaws 9 is a piece of crap. I say this because they charge, and I'll use this example again, for a feature as stupid as fixing gmail into GMail. i will not tolerate that. That was not a bug, and it will not keep any users such as myself. Even though window eyes is about 30 mb in size, I would expect it to grow to the size of jaws. Again, voice over/orca just works. There is not marketting crap going on here. There are no useless features. And most important, hey, it just works. Deal with it. Face the truth. Voice over has never crashed. Only frozen. I can veerify this because on the mac when an app crashes, it brings up a user notification dialogue box and when voice over has stop responding, say in open office beta, I never got that dialogue. In this situation, Voice over has always relaunched itself. Hmmmmmmmm you don't see jaws or winblow eyes do this, now do you?
Cody, i...have...one...thing..to...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz o, sorry, did I nod off their? I hope GW Micro wins this one.
to my mind, it's the tipical american response to any compotition or problem. sue the buggers. is totally wrong in my view. the access tec world is too small for this kind of behaviour.
Post 14 I agree with you we always want money because we live on wealth, and not happiness. although there are some lawsuits taht are very much legit like the one I am in now.
In either case i still would spend any cash with any of these companies anyway. their products do not reflect such a price.
One thing I'm curious about is, does anyone know what else FS has patented?
before we know it, fs will patent the name screen reader and the idea of a screen reader too. they are fucking annoying. me thinks that when my next SMA is due, I will not renew and may think of going to another product. right now though, i'm tied in for one more upgrade. i will seriously think of shifting screen readers though.
The companies try to patent whatever thing they cme up with IBM has the most patents in the world and the highest number of apps. FS cannot patent or copyright the word "screen reader" as it is already in use and already generic. The problem is that U.S. is too liberal granting patents on intellectual property, remember the Amazon one click patent for instance. It's also the attitude of the U.S. consumer. The patent office aires on the side of the inventor and do so too aggressively.
In essence the uniqueness of a screen reader is mostly how it conveys information to the user as the O.S. is the source for both screen readers and any access technologies that are approved by Microsoft are public information and not patentable. So the value of a screen reader, in a sense, is how conveniently and accurately it conveys information to the user, so that's the value they add (or think they add).
So whilst this particular case may be stupid it just underlines the attitude of to many U.S. companies nowadays. For one thing FS's law suit against Serotek for using the word "Freedom" in their products for instance (FS had used the word first and copyrighted it so they had grounds).
Wow, that is... The word hasn't yet been invented to describe how horrible that is! Another screen reader can't use the word "freedom???" :@ and to the previous poster, try NVDA!
I started using jaws at age 8 and do not really want to learn something else. So therefore I have never tryed window eyes. I want to say though that freedom scientific is very hungry and I seriously hope GW Micro wins.
Darcey, do u mean wht other things FS has come out with? the've done magic, the pac mate, jaws...I can't think of anything else of of the top of my head at the moment.
Well, the trademarking or copyright of certain words is commonplace in the States, escolator, elevator, coke to name a few. In Europe, Parma ham (must be from Parma), champagne (must be from the Champagne region of France), all of those words are copyrighted and one is not allowed to use them when naming a product unless one has express permition from the copyright holder. Yes, it's stupid, I agree, but that's just how it is.
kinda funny how the people running the "united" states and their horribly implemented legal take-over-the-world system is implemented... the "country" doesn't have an official language, yet words themselves are copyrighted.
I really doubt if fs is hoping to winn the suit, I imagine they are just trying to get gw to waste some money and use up some resources.
That could be it too. But, who knows.
well fs are a bunch of morons. we all know that.
lol and as for the crapmate, my old phone was more powerful than 1 of them things and i used msp on it and i could do the same as a pacmate. but who needs 1 of them things anyway when you have nokia phones and i must say my n82 is far more responsive.
yes gw micro should win at least i think they should. i'd love to see fs's ass's finally kicked i really would. they are the microsoft of the adaptive tec industry.
Don't be insulting FS! I use JAWS, and have since version 3.7! I have learned JAWS scripting, and don't want to need to learn VB or some other language that works with COM objects. If I need to use a COM object, I juse call the CreateObject function with the object's name, like this: createObject("scripting.dictionary")
I once met reps from all the AT vendors (the major ones) as a project manager intern at Microsoft. I have to say that the GW Micro guys were the nicest, knowledgable, interested and a lot of fun to talk to, the FS guy was very aloof and arrogant and a bit rude (the guy from Dolphin was a hoot actually, very British. sounding like he had a bristling moustache, a bit arrogant, but absolutely a brilliant coder).
Given my experiences of this I'm not entirely surprised by FS's behavior. Doesn't change the fact though that Jaws is still my screen reader of choice (although I'm getting more andmore attracted to System Access, definitely for certain things). I don't care if my favorite song is sung by a druggie who cheated on his wife, or my favorite book written by a murderer, or my favorite software written by a company that doesn't behave the way I want to. I want to enjoy the product regardless of its creator and Jaws has just been a very powerful and, despite what other people say, stable product (on XP it's been rock solid and I run it in pretty processor intensive scenarios). My biggest complaint now is that most of these products are rlying too much on the video intercept manager and I want to see a faster push away from these and into a more OS centric data providing, MSAA and similar, of course there's the problem that not all apps written for Windows follow those standards, but with Vista there's a better chance to vastly improve screen reading access, if there's any interest.
SA is dam good wildabrew, give it a go.
one thing u might want to be aware of is that the vice president of FS, jonathan mosen, has a zone bbs account by the username jmosen. so if u have complaints about FS, why not bring them up with him?
You know i hate to say this but the blunt of the blame doesn't lay squarely on FS. I am guessing no one who has posted thus far in this thread is aware of the fact that if one of your pattens is violated you Have To Sue to Protect it. If they didn't patten technology they brought to market first, then someone else would of pattened it and then turned around and sued FS for using it even though they brought it to market first. So this has more to do with the legal system and the way the patten office operates (and the crappy job they do at establishing prior art in some cases). If FS intentions are good though they will use this lawsuit to work out some kind of out of courtsettlement/ cross licensing deal where each company licenses technology from the other which leads to better products for the comsumer and more competition. But for that to happen both companies will have to want to play ball and be able to come to some kind of agreement. That being said the only FS product i have used is Jaws and it seems pretty stable to me. To the best of my knowledge (and someone feel free to correct me if i am wrong), thanks to things like the jaws scripting language and HotSpotClicker which make it possible to adapt JAWS to work with applications it may not be the most accessable with out of the box, make it a very powerful screenreader and the reason i haven't looked elswhere. Also before switching to a screen reader i got to play with all the main ones (Jaws, Window Eyes, Supernova, etc) and I chose JAWS cuz i thought it was the best sounding and most responsive and easitst to use. I will gladly jump ship to the mac when VOiceOVer works just as well with GarageBand and Logic as Jaws works with Sonar (thanks to that aformentioned scripting language). Apple does hav the advantage here being taht the screen reader is created by the OS makers and thus has the potential to dominate in that area should they choose to.