On Wed, Jul 07, 1999 at 11:45:27 -0700, Brent Fulgham wrote: > OmniORB and TAO both are licensed as Free -- GPL/LGPL combinations by > their respective creators. Consequently, omniorb and TAO have > historically been deemed "Free". > > However, we recently realized that the following licensing terms > were present in the IDL compiler, which contains some SUN Microsystems > code:
Is the IDL compiler a separate part of the OmniORB and TAO packages, or do they contain GPL-ed changes for it? (If it's the latter, I think it's the same regrettable situation as KDE, i.e. not redistributable in binary form) > The obvious problem with the above is that the redistribution terms are > not DFSG-compatible. Indeed. > I originally thought to put omniorb and omniorb-doc in "contrib" and > the devel part in "non-free". Unfortunately, our system does not allow > a "non-free" source package to create free and non-free parts. So I > ended up placing everything in "non-free". Putting the IDL compiler in a source package of its own could fix this. > Happily, this is a temporary state of affairs, as ORL (creators of > omniORB) are rewriting the IDL compiler from scratch. The new version > will not include any SUN code, and will be entirely DFSG-free. Good. > I should also point out that the OmniORB folks are a bit put out that > we are calling their product non-free. I would like to be able to get > at least parts of it back into "main" in the very near future. Please use separate source packages for the free and non-free parts then. Ray -- Cyberspace, a final frontier. These are the voyages of my messages, on a lightspeed mission to explore strange new systems and to boldly go where no data has gone before.
