[omniORB] Future of omniORB

[Duncan Grisby]

On Monday 29 April, "=?iso-8859-1?Q?Alfonso_Tam=E9s?=" wrote:

> Are you planning to make a company to give comercial support for omniORB
> (like MySQL) or a Foundation like Apache ?

I am leaning towards the idea of a company to sell (not give! :-)
commercial support, in addition to the things I outlined in this
message:

  http://www.omniorb.org/omniORB/archives/2002-04/0136.html

> Is AT&T interested in keeping omniORB ?

No. At least if they are, they haven't told me. Given that none of the
core developers now work for AT&T, they are not in a good position to
continue its development.

>   Will they let you lead an independent development effort ?

They don't have any choice, since omniORB has always been released
under the LGPL. Anyone is free to continue development as long as they
adhere to the LGPL terms. (And GPL for various bits.)

>   And if this is the case, are you interested
> in continue to lead omniORB into the future ?

Yes.

> What will happen to omniNotify and omniORBpy ?

omniNotify was developed by a separate part of AT&T, so it has not
been directly affected by the closure of AT&T Labs Cambridge. As far
as I know, Bob Gruber is continuing to maintain it as an AT&T project.
The only thing that has to change there is the CVS and FTP hosting,
since it was hosted in Cambridge. I'm sure there will be an
announcement about that soon.

omniORBpy was written entirely by me, and has been cut of with the
Cambridge lab. I'm going to continue to look after it.

> Where are Sai-Lai Lo and David Riddoch ?

Sai-Lai is in China. You can read his farewell message here:

  http://www.omniorb.org/omniORB/archives/2001-10/0137.html

David is doing a PhD in the Laboratory for Communications
Engineering.

> How can we help to keep omniORB alive ?

Either by contributing time to help develop it, or by contacting me to
discuss development or support contracts. At the moment I'm most
interested in the latter.

Yours,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby         --
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