Re: Classpath and org.omg.*

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 20:26, Stuart Ballard wrote:
> I think I see a fairly simple way that OMG could preserve the integrity 
> of the CORBA standard while remaining Free Software. In much the same 
> way as some Free licenses allow free modification but require that 
> anyone making such modifications must change the name of the software, 
> couldn't the OMG say something like:
> 
> "You may modify this software, but if you distribute a modified version 
> you must change the package name to something that does not begin with 
> 'org.omg'."

That would restrict certain functionality since package scoping is an
important functionality of the java language. It has meaning to the
language runtime. So this would not be something we could use to provide
a free software implementation.

> If we were to advocate this solution to the OMG, we should at least make 
> sure we have consensus within the Free Software community that the 
> solution we're proposing is acceptable. (I think the benchmark for 
> "everyone agrees it's free enough" is if RMS and debian-legal are both 
> okay with it ;) )

My proposal is to discuss how the FSF dealt with this issue with the W3C
organisation, which has separate policies for distributions of their
specifications and any (derived) software. The distribution policy for
their software is GPL compatible (we use it for example by importing the
GNU JAXP package which comes with org.w3c packages).

Brian has send me the latest correspondence he had with the FSF and
someone of the OMG about this issue. Hopefully we can continue that
discussion and come to some solution that makes it possible to provide a
free implementation of the CORBA specification classes.

Cheers,

Mark

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