Retrospective on OSD6/700 Course
Post Mortem
So as a part of my migration from Wordpress to 11ty, I've had a look at a few of my blog posts and I kind of want to write down my personal opinions on it and about open source.
I've also been trying out different linux distros before landing on Pop OS to try to use mainly for about 6 months. I've also continued to contribute a bit to Cockatrice, which is the open source card playing game project. So that's essentially what I've continued to improve on with open source since the previous blogs.
With that cleared, I feel a bit qualified to talk and have a opinion about it (Also, in my opinion I feel like you don't neccessarily need to be qualified to have a say in this) Part of why I feel like you don't need to be qualified to talk about it is because I feel like that is a bit of a toxic mindset to have as a community member in the open source community. You don't need to be a code writer or a programmer to have an opinion or have your opinion heard for open source software/projects but I feel like it's an overwhelming mindset from a lot of people that you have to be a programmer or else you're like a poser; for example you'll get a lot of "Post PR or STFU" they stuff which I don't think is correct. There are people who are directly affected by open source projects and I think they should get a say in it even if they can't directly contribute, that is a part of the nature of open source in my opinion. Like software support isn't always guaranteed in a lot of open source licensing which is fine but I think there's a lot to be listened to from other people.
Accessibility
Accessibility is really overlooked in software, it's very just overlooked by many different aspects. You could look at how unaccessible Linkedin is somehow in this damn year 2025, why would not have a team or anything or like a large amount of resources to improve the accessibility of Linkedin. A lot of websites just aren't that accessible and a lot of the tools are kind of lacking both on the dev side and the user side. Like the main tool I've come across is Axe-Tools and I feel like there should be more than just that; an eslint esque type tool but for accessiblity. But getting back on track to open source, I feel like the focus on accessibility is lacking in open source which sometimes comes with the retort of "You yourself can modify the software" but that shouldn't be neccessary. If you truly believe in Linux as an operating system for people and a bit more community run then you should make it be a bit more accessibililty first/have a focus on it. Like a lot of accessibility tools like TTS and screen reading on linux alternatives are bad compared to MacOS or Windows alternatives which kinda suck.
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Week 13