Re: TAO license - Debian misinterpretation (fwd)]
Hi guys,
Doug Schmidt just sent me a response that I think we at Debian may feel better
about. Hopefully his clarification will make us rethink our position on TAO's
license.
By the way, I really appreciate all the feedback I've been getting about this
issue. I realize that some of the things I said may seem adversarial but I
only intended to provoke thought, not cause controversy. Thanks to everyone
who responded for being so "cool" about everything. :)
Please let me know what you guys think about Doug's response. I'd really like
to make TAO part of the main distribution.
Thanks,
-Ossama
----- Forwarded message from "Douglas C. Schmidt" <schmidt@cs.wustl.edu> -----
X-Authentication-Warning: tango.cs.wustl.edu: schmidt owned process doing -bs
To: Ossama Othman <othman@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu>
Subject: Re: TAO license - Debian misinterpretation (fwd)
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 14 Dec 1998 14:23:20 EST."
<Pine.GSO.4.02.9812141421380.27512-100000@breezy.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 19:48:48 -0600
From: "Douglas C. Schmidt" <schmidt@cs.wustl.edu>
Hi Ossama,
> Here is another one. If I get anymore, I'll wait a few hours just
> in case they keep coming in.
Ok, great, thanks. Here is my response. Please feel free to forward
it.
> This is not a matter of "breaking the standard" [*]
>
> People should be able to modify TAO to conform to *another*
> standard. If they do not have this freedom, TAO is not free enough.
People can certainly modify TAO to support any standard they want (in
fact, we're planning on doing this to support a DCOM/CORBA bridge
shortly, as well as a wide variety of protocols other than IIOP 1.0).
As long as it's still possible to ALSO support IIOP 1.0 with the
modified version, then there's no problem wrt the Sun license. If you
want to remove the IIOP support completely, then you'll need to check
with Sun to make sure that's ok.
BTW, once we have support for "pluggable protocols" in TAO then the
whole issue will become moot anyway because it'll be possible to
"plug" IIOP 1.0 in and out of any version of TAO -- thereby making it
possible to conform to the Sun license while being able to support any
other protocol, as well.
For more information about pluggable protocols, please see
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/RT-ORB-std.ps.gz
and look for the chapter on Pluggable Protocols.
> [*] If the standard is good enough, people will not want to use a
> program that does not conform to the standard, so there is no need
> to write that in the license, but if the standard is not good enough
> and we need a new one, then everybody should be able to modify the
> TAO program to conform to the new standard, not only TAO authors.
I respectfully think that you're confused wrt the Sun license, which
isn't there only for the TAO authors, but which we also must respect.
Fortunately, as I point out above, with the forthcoming "pluggable
protocols" feature you can support any protocols you want, either
standard or non-standard. Naturally, you're also free to
modify/subset/superset any other parts of TAO that are based on the
ACE components, which have nothing to do with the SunSoft IIOP
protocol engine and thus do not fall under their licensing terms.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks,
Doug
----- End forwarded message -----
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