Sonar GNU/Linux merges with Vinux

[Linux for blind general discussion]

According to John Heim:
# Kyle, it is just your opinion that a screen reader should not be in the
# kernel. And your reasoning for saying that amounts to that it shouldn't
# be in the kernel.

I'm sorry you have such a hard time fully reading what I wrote. I did 
indeed give a fair number of reasons why a screen reader must be a 
userspace application and should never be bound to a kernel. The fact 
that you either did not read them or did not fully understand them 
changes nothing. I didn't just say that a screen reader shouldn't be 
bound to a kernel simply because it shouldn't be bound to a kernel. I 
clearly mentioned flexibility, portability, security/stability and 
ability to innovate without needing to know how to code for the kernel 
or answer to kernel developers as very specific and valid reasons for 
needing a screen reader to be a userspace application. There is also the 
fact that running a screen reader in a kernel is essentially running a 
user application inside of kernel address space, but that ties into the 
stability and security rationale. Would you run a phone application from 
the kernel? Would you run even a speech synthesizer itself from inside 
of the kernel? How about something like a print server? Of course not. 
Because the kernel is the direct means of communicating with the 
hardware, and should be little else. A screen reader is not truly a 
device. It is an application that communicates information between 
applications and the user via various i/o devices. Therefore, it should 
be interfaced to the kernel in the same way any other application that 
communicates between the end user and the devices the kernel exposes 
should do. In interfacing in this way, the screen reader becomes fully 
portable, as secure as any user application can be, and fully flexible, 
and also becomes capable of receiving contributions from a much larger 
community of developers, most of which know little to nothing about 
kernel code.
~Kyle