Re: Bug#40937: omniorb: Freeness?

[othman@cs.wustl.edu]

Hi,

Just some clarifications...

On  7 Jul, J.H.M. Dassen wrote:
 > On Wed, Jul 07, 1999 at 11:45:27 -0700, Brent Fulgham wrote:
 > >    OmniORB and TAO both are licensed as Free -- GPL/LGPL combinations by
 > >    their respective creators.  Consequently, omniorb and TAO have
 > >    historically been deemed "Free".

Right.  However, TAO is not licensed under the GPL/LPGL.  It is
licensed under the Center for Distributed Object Computing's license
terms.  Those licensing terms are considered DFSG-free by Debian, as
implied by the DFSG-freeness of my Debian ACE packages.

 > >    However, we recently realized that the following licensing terms
 > >    were present in the IDL compiler, which contains some SUN Microsystems
 > >    code:
 > 
 > Is the IDL compiler a separate part of the OmniORB and TAO packages, or do
 > they contain GPL-ed changes for it? (If it's the latter, I think it's the
 > same regrettable situation as KDE, i.e. not redistributable in binary form)

The situation for TAO is slightly different.  In OmniORB's case, only
the IDL compiler is licensed under the Sun terms.  In TAO's case, some
of the code (which, BTW, is almost gone) in TAO's ORB core and its IDL
compiler is licensed under the Sun terms.  Over 90% of the code is
non-Sun code.  Unfortunately, this doesn't help matters in terms of its
DFSG-freeness. :(

Efforts are underway to try convince Sun to remove the problem clause
in their licensing terms.

Thanks,
-Ossama
-- 
Ossama Othman <othman@cs.wustl.edu>
Center for Distributed Object Computing, Washington University, St. Louis
58 60 1A E8 7A 66 F4 44  74 9F 3C D4 EF BF 35 88  1024/8A04D15D 1998/08/26