[omniORB] AMI and porting to Playstation

[Duncan Grisby]

On Monday 24 November, Kevin Wooten wrote:

> I am in the middle of porting omniORB to the Playstation 2, I don't mean
> Linux on the Playstation, I mean using the raw kernel, which is the problem.
> I thought about the licensing and realized it precludes me from doing this!!
> I cannot provide the source code to the public domain, as much as I would
> love to. This is mostly a Sony issue, in that I am not allowed under any
> circumstances to provide information to non-licensed developers about SDK
> information. I am just checking to see if there is a way around this or not?
> So far I have reworked the threading and sockets to start to get it working
> (I hope that isn't too much information). Is there any way around this? Or
> should I move on to creating my own (much less amazing) ORB?

Well, I am not a lawyer, so this is all just my opinion. Also,
although some of the copyright to omniORB belongs to me or companies I
have control over, the majority of it is owned by "AT&T Laboratories
Cambridge Ltd". That company no longer exists, so I don't know exactly
who owns the copyright. It is safe to assume that it is probably owned
by AT&T. Basically, that means there is not much hope of changing the
license of omniORB.

So, the question is whether you can proceed while staying within the
terms of the LGPL. Obviously, the ideal situation would be for you to
release your modifications under the LGPL, but if Sony won't permit
that, there may be other options. First, omnithread is a pretty simple
API. It shouldn't be too hard to implement all of it without using any
code from the existing implementations. An independent implementation
of the omnithread API would definitely not be a derived work of
omnithread, so you would be free to use that without restriction.

For the other things, the situation is rather more tricky. I _think_
it would be acceptable under the LGPL for you to define an API
encapsulating the Playstation specific code, and modify omniORB to use
that API. The LGPL terms would require you to release those
modifications to omniORB. However, you would not, I believe, have to
release the implementation of the API. That would especially be true
if you could arrange for the API implementation to be a dynamically
linked library (I don't know if the Playstation has such things).

I hope that helps, but please don't hold me responsible for any
consequences...

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
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