Re: CORBA

[Jeff Bailey]

Le jeudi 03 mars 2005 à 12:47 +1000, Stephen Crawley a écrit :

Sorry for the lag in responding.  I lost a month's worth of mail, and
this was in the middle of it.  I had to recover this from GNU's ticket
system.

> b) It is not clear (to me) that this does not violate the OMG's
> copyright.  Certainly, it is doing something that they were
> (historically) trying to prevent.

According to the good folks at address@hidden:

*> Our current plan is to just reimplement all the classes for GNU
*> Classpath based on the public specification published by OMG
*> (ftp://ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/ptc/00-01-08.pdf)
*...
*> The zip file, is the zip file containing the source above. And often
*the
*> actual classes and interfaces we need to implement are not that much
*> bigger than the examples given in the specification. This means that
*our
*> implementation will look very similar to the example code in the
*> specification (and probably to the "official implementation"
*contained
*> in the zip file).
*
*This sounds like a standard case of scenes a faire:
*
*'Likewise, when similar features of a work are “as a practical matter
*indispensable, or at least standard, in the treatment of a given idea,
*they are treated like ideas and are therefore not protected by
*copyright.' (Apple v. Microsoft)
*
*So, yes, you can do this.

> c) I'm not sure that a Classpath-based VM can claim CORBA compliance if
> it uses a version of the org.omg classes that come from a different
> source. It might mean that (for example) all Linux distros that include
> a Classpath-based Java implementation needs to get the CORBA compliance
> testing done themselves if they want a "CORBA-x.y" compliant badge.

Certainly it can't.  But we can't claim Java compliance either. =)

The best I suspect that we could do is say 'Implements OMG Spec 00-01-08
(OMG IDL To Java Language Mapping)', and even that I would want to run
past FSF legal.

But that's a simple statement of truth at least.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey