What's an "open architecture"?
Oct. 15th, 2002 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayThe 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.
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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alas
Date: 2002-10-15 12:20 pm (UTC)ODBC, OLE-DB and ADO are not MS tools, they are MS standards, and yes, they are open architecure because microsoft has published the standards, and other people are able to write their own software to those specifications. there are ODBC drivers for non-MS operating systems, for example; i'm using them on our linux and irix systems to hook up to a MS SQL server.
if you want to convince northrop that they owe you the software for non-MS systems as well, you'll need to find the place in the contract where the target OS is specified, and see whether there's a loophole. if there is no target OS specified, that would be a serious oversight IMO, but that might give you a way out, since you can say "well, we don't want it running on windows since we don't use windows, we want it running on unix". but i think this goes way into the realm of legal advice, and you should contact one of your lawyers (who hopefully knows something about software).
in any case, none of this will make this northrop product open source, unless your contract has specified that or its equivalent in so many words. you might not even own the software; it all depends.