Re: Classpath and org.omg.*

[Stuart Ballard]

Stephen Crawley wrote:
> IMO, it is a GOOD THING that the OMG defends the integrity of these
> interfaces as best they can.  It so happens that they have decided that
> a restrictive copyright notice is their most effective tool for doing 
> this.  They are probably right.  [You may disagree, but then you need
> to understand the nature of the organisation and its relationship with
> the ORB vendors.]

> While OMG staffers are generally supportive of Open Source (AFAIK), they
> are >>not<< going to be persuaded to do things that openly undermine the
> integrity of the CORBA standards.  It would be against the interest of
> the OMG's 700+ member organisations, and the OMG Board would stomp on
> them with big boots.

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'."


At least, such a change would meet *my* criteria as Free Software - in a 
Free environment, if you need to use and distribute a modified version, 
you can do a simple Find/Replace/Recompile on whatever software you're 
using to point to the new package name. Unfortunately some people might 
not consider this to be Free enough - you couldn't plug a modified 
version into a proprietary application that expected the org.omg package 
name, for example. I consider this to be a moot point because people who 
care about freedom aren't using such applications.

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 ;) )

I'd hope it would be acceptable to the OMG because it doesn't allow any 
vendor to subvert the integrity of the standard: the subversion becomes 
pretty blatant when you find that the vendor's libraries aren't in the 
org.omg package.

If everyone agrees that this proposal is "free enough", perhaps it's 
something that the FSF could approach the OMG with - or individuals here 
such as yourself or Brian who have contacted them could try advocating.

BTW, I'm in full agreement with you that this is something that will 
become very important in the long run.

Stuart.

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Stuart Ballard, Senior Web Developer
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