How to handle the Meridio connector

[Karl Wright <da...@gmail.com>]

Hi folks,

I've been looking into what is needed to provide "stubs" for the
Meridio connector.

The Meridio connector is a .NET application; the whole thing's
communication layer is essentially built from WSDLs and XSDs.  The
WSDLs and XSDs that a release engineer currently needs to build the
connector were originally obtained by interrogating the appropriate
services on a Meridio installation, through the standard .NET
procedures for doing that (there's a specific Microsoft tool that is
distributed with the .NET framework which does this task for you,
given the service's URL).  The resulting WSDLs and XSDs also had to be
"hacked" in order to work with Axis; those hacks are checked into svn
as ".xmldiff" files.

It's not clear to me whether it would be legally ok to just save
ourselves a ton of work and just check in the WSDLs and XSDs into svn.
 MetaCarta's engineer who made the decision to exclude these materials
was not knowledgeable about licensing standards around WSDLs, so I
view his decision to exclude as based more on an abundance of caution
than necessarily a real legal concern.  But since, if WSDLs are
protected materials, we'd need to do a "clean room" WSDL rewrite in
order to build a "stub", we really need to figure out whether it is
worth that time and effort I think.

If anyone has an opinion here, or a reference, please chime in.  If I
don't hear anything or find reassuring policy statements, I'll raise a
LEGAL ticket, which might take a considerable amount of time to
resolve.

Karl