[omniORB] Licensing Issues

[Sai-Lai Lo]

Jason,

Your interpretation of the licensing terms is correct.
If you want an example of how a shrink-wrapped product satifies omniORB's
license requirements, have a look at Adobe Messenger's page:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrmessenger/main.html

and

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/6012.htm

Thank you for letting us know about your use of omniORB in your product.

Although it is not a requirement, it would be helpful if all omniORB users
can keep us informed on the product they have used omniORB
successfully. The information is useful for us to chart our future
development plan. Our management is also keen to know how well omniORB is
doing in the open source software world. Some concrete supporting data are
very useful.


Regards,

Sai-Lai


>>>>> Jason Nye writes:

> Hi all,
> I know that there is a question about this in the FAQ, but I am trying to be 
> as paranoid as possible over this.

> Here is a description of the project I am working on (I am the software 
> architect):

> My company provides turnkey solutions for the optics industry -- machines
> that process eyeglass lenses. These machines are considered 'black boxes'
> -- you turn them on, they run, you turn them off when you're done.

> The architecture of the software that controls this system has to be
> distributed for proper process management, monitoring etc. I did an
> evaluation of many products (including DCOM which is an absolute mess)
> and my final decision is omniORB due to its excellent price ;) and its
> performance.  We weren't looking for umpteen million CORBA services -- in
> fact, the plan is that we are not even going to have a naming service! We
> were just looking for bare bones features so we did not have to spend our
> time coding TCP/IP messages manually and creating proprietary protocols
> -- we needed to be able to develop this quickly.

> That being said, our customers are not really software users. They care
> that these machines have high uptimes and they care about the numbers at
> the end of the day. When the machine gets installed at a customer site,
> the LGPL will be included with the release notes and any of our
> licenses. The customer will know that omniORB is the foundation on which
> the machines run and they will know that if they have a programming
> staff, they are free to change the source of omniORB at will to provide
> further functionality or fix bugs.  However, our source code is by NO
> MEANS available at any cost. We have physicists working on optical
> problems and providing software solutions that cannot be disclosed
> because of the amount of $$ invested and for intellectual property
> reasons.

> Our software will be distributed to customers along with the omniORB
> run-time libraries. Is there anything I've missed in my interpretation of
> how your omniORB is licensed? My understanding is that our code can
> remain closed as long as we tell our customers that we are using omniORB
> and that they are free to change the omniORB source and since it is a
> dll, the changes will automatically work with our software. I don't want
> to open up a bag of licensing issues that force us to open our sourcecode
> and give all our secrets away which we absolutely cannot afford.


-- 
Sai-Lai Lo                                   S.Lo@uk.research.att.com
AT&T Laboratories Cambridge           WWW:   http://www.uk.research.att.com 
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