jay: (wired)
jay ([personal profile] jay) wrote2002-10-15 11:22 am

What's an "open architecture"?

The vehicle health management contractor (Northrop) wants to supply its end-products only in Windows versions. I'm the contract monitor, and believe that open-source-compatible versions are in the public's and NASA's best interest. And I have no way to run anything on Windows, since all I have access to are OS X Macs, Suns, and Linux boxes. The contractor wants to charge extra to provide non-MS copies of the software.



They promised, in the original (now publicly-available, unrestricted) proposal to:
The bridges between the DME information stored in the warehousing database and the DME tools will be built using industry-standard, open-architecture standards, primarily Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC), Object Linking and Embedded Data Base (OLE-DB), and ActiveX.

Here they toss out some MS-specific tools, but say "open-architecture"... now they claim that they can stick to MS-only because they only quoted it with MS tool examples. Ignoring whatever "open" meant.

So... does anyone know of non-Windows versions of OLE-DB, ActiveX and ODBC? If so, with that and the "open architecture" quote I can probably nail these guys... thanks.

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