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# What is MICO?

The acronym MICO expands to MICO Is CORBA. The intention of this project is to provide a freely available and fully compliant implementation of the CORBA standard (see [5]). MICO has become quite popular as an OpenSource project and is widely used for different purposes. As a major milestone, MICO has been branded as <a CORBA compliant by the OpenGroup, thus demonstrating that OpenSource can indeed produce industrial strength software. Our goal is to keep MICO compliant to the latest CORBA standard. The sources of MICO are placed under the GNU-copyright notice (see chapter 8). The following design principles guided the implementation of MICO:

1. start from scratch: only use what standard UNIX API has to offer; don't rely on proprietary or specialized libraries.
2. use C++ for the implementation.
3. only make use of widely available, non-proprietary tools.
4. omit ``bells and whistles'': only implement what is required for a CORBA compliant implementation.
5. clear design even for implementation internals to ensure extensibility.

You should visit our homepage frequently for updates. We will continue to develop MICO, providing bug fixes as well as new features. Information about the MICO project is available at `http://www.mico.org`.

Further informations about MICO can be found in the book MICO: An Open Source CORBA Implementation published by dpunkt.verlag (`http://www.dpunkt.de/mico`) in Europe and Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. (`http://www.mkp.com/mico`) in North America. The book includes a CD with the complete source code of MICO as well as binaries for various platforms as ready to run executables. It explains how to install and use MICO. A little tutorial gets you going with a sample CORBA application. All features of MICO are well documented both in the manual and in online man-pages. MICO is fully interoperable with other CORBA implementations, such as Orbix from Iona or VisiBroker from Inprise. The manual contains a step-by-step procedure showing how to connect MICO with other CORBA implementations. It even includes sample programs from various CORBA textbooks to show you all aspects of CORBA.

How to support MICO
The authors have worked very hard to make MICO a usable and free CORBA 2.3 compliant implementation. If you find MICO useful and would like to support it, there is an easy way to do so: contribute to the development of MICO by implementing those parts of the CORBA standard, which are still missing in MICO. Although MICO is fully CORBA 2.3 compliant, there are some parts of the standard (like the CORBAservices) which are not mandatory and which we did not implement. We hope that our decision to place the complete sources of MICO under the GNU public license will encourage other people to contribute their code (see section 8 for details).

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