Re: CORBA

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 11:36 +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:
> The practical solution, whenever we come across unfree software that
> we need, is re-implement it.

And that is what Audrius has now set out to do. Thank you so much
Audrius! You are doing what we have been talking about for years but
what nobody actually did.

>   Either that, or to persuade the original
> author to free it.  But we don't wait very long.

Chris has contacted OMG about this. But he hasn't heard back. Our main
problem here is that neither the FSF nor Debian nor any other
oranisation we know has very good contacts with them. The changes needed
to the distribution terms wouldn't be that big. Basically add the words
"modify and redistribute" to the distribution terms they now us for
their implementation. If they don't want that, then we will not use
their implementation of course.

> In the case of CORBA, we have a specification.

And a publicly published one. As Jeff pointed out we have asked FSF
legal whether we could use this specification for implementing our own
compatible free implementation of these interfaces and the answer was
yes. Basically whenever there is a publicly published specification or
an interface describing what is needed for implementing a free
implementation we can do that.

Cheers,

Mark

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