Re: Netscape Code

[Ted Halmrast <tedh@tera.teralink.com>]

On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Matthew Benjamin wrote:

> 
> AM-INFO folk,
> 
> As a programmer, I can say that one of the most important questions
> about Netscape's promise to distribute Communicator source code, is
> whether it includes the CORBA/IIOP object protocol capability included
> in Communicator 4.
> 
> If so, CORBA should be a major focus of energy by advocates of open
> computer systems, and a competitive software industry.  
> 
> CORBA is an OPEN object-oriented communication protocol, sort of like
> Microsoft's COM/OLE/ActiveX-but it is in the public domain, supervised
> by the Object Management Group, a consortium of 700+ industry companies.
> Anyone can download the CORBA specifications, and efficient, free
> implementations of CORBA exist (eg,
> http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html ).  Free availability of a
> commercial CORBA client implementation would give CORBA a major boost in
> the marketplace.
> 
> Widespread support for CORBA protocols would be a major blow for
> Microsoft, which is trying to lock the customers into its own,
> proprietary protocols, which are essentially supported only on
> Microsoft's Operating Systems.  It would be a significant win for open
> competition in the software industry.

Hear, hear !!

To this I would add that CORBA is also a much cleaner and more powerful
distributed object protocol than DCOM/COM/Active-X/OLE.

OMG is located at http://www.omg.org.

Ted Halmrast
tedh@tera.teralink