So why are we writing the openisis software? Because Isis is not open
source software, it's not even free software, and that leads to a
whole bunch of problems.

*	problems resulting from closed software

-	Availability (in theory)
	Versions of the software exist for some operating systems, library
	versions and languages. For other environments, there is no
	version of the software, and there is not much one can do about
	it.
-	Availability (in practice)
	You may download most the software, but it's partly protected with
	passwords, which you have to order at some national distributor.
	You have to pay some fee and/or declare some good reasons, why you
	want to use the software. Then you have to wait. In germany, for
	example, it didn't work at all for some time, until the newly
	founded
>	http://www.isisnetz.de/	IsisNetz
	remedied the situation.
-	Availability (in legal terms)
	Some parts of the software are accompanied by different documents
	stating some license terms, others are not. Terms seem to be
	pretty different between countries. One can not easily figure out,
	what exactly might be allowed usage.
-	Availability (of documentation)
	Some documentation is available in english, some only in
	portugese, espanol or italiano. Only a small part is downloadable
	at all, most is paperware.
-	Bugfixing
	There is no way one can fix a bug, and not much one can do about
	having somebody fix it.
-	Extending
	The only way one could write a Binding for perl or Java would be
	using the isis.dll. There are problems with regard to required
	additional libraries (especially some C++ stuff), there are no
	statements about thread safety, unicode compatibility and so on.
	As a consequence, it's practically impossible to write a
	state-of-the-art web application based on an isis db.
-	Improving
	Many users develop useful ideas for improvements from practice.
	Their expertise is lost as they are not able to turn it into
	improved software.
-	Enabling
	While open source software enables people all over the world to
	shape their tools themselves, closed software lets them in
	dependency.

*	benefits of open software

To address these problems we feel the need for an open source
implementation of isis. Of course it would be best to have all of the
existing isis code under one or the other form of open license (GPL,
LGPL, artistic or similar as appropriate).


On the other hand, an independent secondary implementation has
advantages in it's own right. It may have a different focus and
develop strengths in one aspect while another aproach performs better
in other situations. For example, openisis will have some support for
multithreading and unicode, which is paid for by a certain overhead. A
rewrite by developers with a different background might introduce new
ideas which finally, after having had their indepent test bed, help
improve the standard.


OpenIsis as a software to access isis databases is and will be freely
available for everybody with full sourcecode, no fee, no restrictions.