[omniORB] Support for omniORB

[Andy Harter]

Dear omniORB'ers,

We are giving some thought to providing commercial support for omniORB.

We will continue to support and develop omniORB under GPL.
We believe CORBA is important, and that the community needs good 
quality freely accessible software.

However, we are aware of a growing number of applications where
lack of commercial support prevents omniORB from being adopted
in spite of technical merit. This includes in house software systems, 
products shipped with omniORB, and corporate ORB recommendations to 
vendors and customers.

If you have a possible requirement for commercial support, 
or have any views on this subject, we would value your input.
In particular, your views on the following would be appreciated:

1. Which platform do you need to be supported?
   Although omniORB has been ported to a number of platforms, we only
   test and distribute binaries for a subset of these. We could expand
   this subset in the context of providing commercial support.

2. We would propose a mainly email support system.
   Is this sufficient, or is there a requirement for telephone support?

3. What are your requirements for response times for:
   a) Advice and assistance with problems
   b) Patches and release revisions for bug fixes

4. What additional core ORB features do you consider essential,
   in order of importance? Note that the following features 
   are currently missing.

   DSI/DII
   IIOP over SSL
   POA
   IR

5. Which CORBA Services do you consider essential?

6. How many developers would you require support for?

7. Do you have any need for licences other than GPL & GLPL?
   
Any other additional comments you may have are welcome.
Many thanks for taking an interest in omniORB.


Andy Harter
Principal Research Engineer

E-mail:		aharter@orl.co.uk	|	ORL
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