January 01, 2002
Can CORBA Sidestep Open-Source Licensing? (Web Techniques, Apr 2001)The open-source movement has sparked an explosion of new software and code, all freely available to developers. Companies that were once locked into costly licenses can now access the source code for everything from compilers, editors, and scripting interpreters to packages like MySQL and Linux. This is great for businesses that would rather extend existing code than reinvent the wheel—but there's a catch. If you rerelease the original code, most open-source licenses (with the notable exception of BSD-style licenses) require that you also give away the code to any improvements you've made. And a number of open-source licenses state that you may not use the code in commercial software you plan to license restrictively on a per-copy basis.
Figure 1
Using CORBA wrappers to leverage open-source code.
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