>>How do you want to license all of this?
>
>
> Well, I'm thinking free/open source. The components will be that way, but I
> figure I can sell it, too, to the school districts that can afford it, and
> give it away to those that can't. For instance, the school where I volunteer
> (in Pasco County) has gobs of money for computers and software, but there are
> schools I know of in Tampa that don't have an extra penny to spare. I'm also
> thinking about doing this on a service basis: here's your free product, and
> if you can figure it out, great! If not, I have a contract to sell you for
> service and support. It should be enough for a living at some point, which is
> all I'm interested in. I don't want to make a killing...
>
However you want to license it, you should make it clear to all
contributors (before they make their contributions). I have seen some
projects actually getting developers to *sign* agreements that the code
which they contribute may be distributed in accordance with the terms of
the GPL (or whatever). This might be especially important if you want
to dual-license (anyone can use the project IAW GPL, but only you can
use the project IAW a commercial license). I think that Netscape did
this with Mozilla and Sun did this with OpenOffice.
You wouldn't actually need this 'commercial license' if your only
intention is to make money from support contracts. In fact, once you
distribute the code via GPL, anyone is free to try to enter into support
contract arrangements with the same schools that you do. The only
benefit that the commercial license would give to you is that you (and
only you) could take the GPL'd codebase, and write and distribute
proprietary upgrades that are not OpenSource.
RE using the CORBA components: If you really want a globally-useful
GPL'd project, then you can't depend on these commercial components.
One way that you CAN use these components, is in getting the project off
the ground. Use the commercial components to perform their tasks, so
that you can focus your team on the specialized functionality of the
Gradebook. Then, when OpenSource redistribution becomes more important
than adding new features, you can go back and tear-out the dependencies
by writing your own code to provide that functionality. You can do this
one component at a time (or each team of developers can work on
replacing one component).
You could even choose to implement your version of that functionality by
writing CORBA components which have the same IDL interfaces as the
closed-source components. This should mean that you don't have to
change any of your application code. At run-time, you point your
application at one of your components or at one of the commercial
components. I have sent some component information directly to your box.
--ronan
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