[omniORB] Licensing Issues

[Jason Nye]

Hi all,

I know that there is a question about this in the FAQ, but I am trying to be 
as paranoid as possible over this.

Here is a description of the project I am working on (I am the software 
architect):

My company provides turnkey solutions for the optics industry -- machines 
that process eyeglass lenses. These machines are considered 'black boxes' -- 
you turn them on, they run, you turn them off when you're done.

The architecture of the software that controls this system has to be 
distributed for proper process management, monitoring etc. I did an 
evaluation of many products (including DCOM which is an absolute mess) and my 
final decision is omniORB due to its excellent price ;) and its performance. 
We weren't looking for umpteen million CORBA services -- in fact, the plan is 
that we are not even going to have a naming service! We were just looking for 
bare bones features so we did not have to spend our time coding TCP/IP 
messages manually and creating proprietary protocols -- we needed to be able 
to develop this quickly. 

That being said, our customers are not really software users. They care that 
these machines have high uptimes and they care about the numbers at the end 
of the day. When the machine gets installed at a customer site, the LGPL will 
be included with the release notes and any of our licenses. The customer will 
know that omniORB is the foundation on which the machines run and they will 
know that if they have a programming staff, they are free to change the 
source of omniORB at will to provide further functionality or fix bugs. 
However, our source code is by NO MEANS available at any cost. We have 
physicists working on optical problems and providing software solutions that 
cannot be disclosed because of the amount of $$ invested and for intellectual 
property reasons.

Our software will be distributed to customers along with the omniORB run-time 
libraries. Is there anything I've missed in my interpretation of how your 
omniORB is licensed? My understanding is that our code can remain closed as 
long as we tell our customers that we are using omniORB and that they are 
free to change the omniORB source and since it is a dll, the changes will 
automatically work with our software. I don't want to open up a bag of 
licensing issues that force us to open our sourcecode and give all our 
secrets away which we absolutely cannot afford.

Thanks for your help,
Jason.