> oops,

> I'm quite new on OCF - just closed the first project with this.
> I didn't realize the severeness of the issue from the header until today.

> My vote: don't let OCF die!

> As a small company, we cannot put too much into a missionary project 
(which
> IBM and others can't support....), but what we maybe could do:
> - some hosting - maybe not only static pages, but also Lotus Notes based
> Groupware (eg. team room for moderating discussions)
> - whatever can be done on a Linux box (Mailing List ?)
> - some modest contribution, like some card services and terminal
> implementations and adaptations we produced so far

Personally, I do not think that OCF will survive as an open source 
project. Most of us have written applications that use OCF for a specific 
card type or a set of readers. The whole point of OCF is that it is 
flexible and is not tied to any one of these.

However, achieving that goal and testing code does require help from the 
card companies. If they cannot dedicate resources to OCF now, I doubt 
they will in the future when/if it is open source.

True, many readers use PC/SC now, but that is not really the future us 
Java developers would like is it?

"Pure" java solutions � barring comms speed issues � should be sought 
wherever possible because of the portability and stability it affords us.

Also, OCF is not without its problems � in terms of bugs and architecture 
issues. It's a bit of a mess in places. Turning it to open source could 
just worsen this situation... I hope not. However not many of use really 
want to hack through all the strange legacy code that is there to solve 
bugs and at the same time perhaps kill support for some hardware we don't 
have ourselves.

That's why the consortium is important. All the hardware guys are sitting 
around the table and can test everything and contribute code for their 
own devices.

Frankly, I can't believe that Sun will let this important part of 
Smartcard development die. They have invested a lot in Javacard and to 
have no standard reliable and "live and kicking" API for writing host 
applications seems insane. It's the bridge between the Javacards and 
J2SE.

$0.02

Cheers



---
> Visit the OpenCard web site at http://www.opencard.org/ for more
> information on OpenCard---binaries, source code, documents.
> This list is being archived at http://www.opencard.org/archive/opencard/

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