Re: JAWS and its license history
JAWS bashes it's competitors because it is directly advantageous for them to eliminate any possible competition. If NVDA is given the image of being gutter trash, people will be more willing to spend a ridiculous amount on JAWS. Especially those who don't know better.
Of course it's not unique to FS but do you really believe that we should be privatizing accessibility? FS demonstrates clearly how accessibility is particularly vulnerable.
One just has to look at GW Micro conducts itself in comparison... although personally I think that accessibility is just too vulnerable to the problems of markets. Blind people have fixed incomes and rely heavily on assistance which makes privatization pretty absurd imho. Not to mention that with a distributed development team, the possibility of finding new solutions skyrockets. Also, forks of noncommercial screenreaders could be produced for specific use cases. You can see a similar sort of development with Linux, although Linux has a much larger developer community and more time to develop.
What NVDA does that is significant isn't necessarily that it's free or a good competitor - it's that the project is able to be contributed to and a fork could be made. NVDA may fall out of favour but since it's code isn't proprietary and not written for profit, it can be layer re-worked into a better engine (again hopefully OS)
Finally regarding resources. I don't know much about how NVDA is funded outside of donations, but if government support stopped sucking off FS and instead helped NVDA it probably could be more competitive.
But I know that's a bit too socialist for Americans to bear. The government supporting something that undermines the free market? Eghad!
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