http://goo.gl/9Kj8PL
When I first met Richard Stallman, he described his philosophy as “information anarchism” and explained his vision for a future of free software in which individuals and corporations voluntarily donate money to support the programmers bringing them free, libre and open source technologies. Stallman’s dream has been the NVDA reality for many years now. NVDA comes from an entirely unregulated system of voluntary donations and has allowed Mick Curren and Jamie Teh to deliver one of the best screen readers ever built to a community yearning for its independence, freedom from Freedom Scientific and its high priced competitors if you will.
Last week, my good friends and business partners, Christopher “Q” Toth and Tyler Spivey took the anarchy to another level, they found that this community would donate its hard earned dollars to an entirely independent effort. The power centers for screen reading had been based in St. Petersburg, Fort Wayne, Orlando/Minnesota and in the UK. Q and Tyler have acted in a manner that shows that some true authority can be derived directly from end users, they stepped up, took on the leadership of a single task (building NVDA Remote Access) and the community took notice, donated the dollars the boys had set as a goal and, soon, all of us will have a really cool free addition to an awesome free screen reader.