berlin hosting .. ?

[Graydon Hoare]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) wrote:

> Berlin is an SPI project.

I'm curious, actually, what is meant by this, as it is also stated on the
SPI pages; it's an ambiguous phrase. If SPI says we should code left, can
we code right, or are we under a mandate to act a particular way as an SPI
project? I don't mean to imply that I disagree with SPI's mandate, but I'd
hate to find out someday that, for instance, I had been implicitly
assigning copyrights on everything I write to some other organization or
something.

> I'm fairly sure this means that Berlin's "contrib" status will be temporary.

we were unaware of omni's "semi-free" status when we began working with
it. when we were informed, we considered dropping omni and porting to TAO
(you can check the mailing list archives) but were dissuaded by remarks to
the effect that having sun's IDL parser in omniidl2 was a horrible mistake
anyway, and none of the omni programmers liked it, so they were going to
evict it shortly.

furthermore, omniidl2 is _not_ required to develop berlin (only to rebuild
its interface marshalling code from IDL), nor is omniidl2's output covered
by the sun license. free code goes in, free code comes out. the situation
would be analogous to putting all GPL'ed C programs in contrib because
there were no free compilers, or putting all CGI programs in contrib
because there were no free webservers. _our_ code is free, going into and
coming out of omniidl2. Thus you can just as easily "pretend"  that
someone "magically" hand-codes all the stubs and skeletons during
development, and commits them to CVS under LGPL, and then everyone else
uses that code. we could even evict omniidl2 from the makefiles if it
would make everyone happy. 

we have every intent of porting to TAO (and orbit C++, if they ever get
around to working) anyway, to evaluate features/performance and
interoperability; and we already use config.h macros to insulate
ORB-dependent parts. we're really just lacking person-power to do the
ports. 

-graydon