[asterisk-app-dev] Asterisk and UniMRCP Licensing

[Ben Merrills]

Great news! 

Will this go any way towards helping get some general support for UniMRCP via ARI? I know when I first brought this up a few months ago, my main motivation was to try and see if there was a path for getting speech functionality exposed into ARI.

Ben

> 
> Hey all -
> 
> In some previous conversations on the Asterisk mailing lists, we noticed that
> some users of Asterisk were using UniMRCP [1] with Asterisk, as well as
> some modules made and distributed by that project. Unfortunately, there
> were some licensing concerns with using UniMRCP with Asterisk. As such, we
> contacted the UniMRCP project regarding the licensing issues and, after
> discussing the issue with them, we believe we have found a good path
> forward such that users of Asterisk and UniMRCP can use both projects
> together without violating the license of Asterisk.
> 
> As you may know, Asterisk is licensed under the GPLv2. When Asterisk is
> statically or dynamically linked with a library, this creates an overall 'derivative
> work' as referred to in the GPL. Barring an exception, this means that any
> library Asterisk dynamically links with must be licensed under a GPLv2
> compatible license. Unfortunately, UniMRCP is not licensed with a GPLv2
> compatible license, as the Apache
> 2.0 license is not compatible with the GPLv2 [2]. This makes distribution of
> modules that link with Asterisk and UniMRCP problematic, as those modules
> technically should not be licensed under the GPLv2 - and hence should not
> be used with Asterisk under the GPLv2 license.
> 
> That being said, we really like the UniMRCP project, and think it a great library
> for providing complex speech services. In the past, when faced with similar
> situations, we've added specific disclaimers to the licensing of the Asterisk
> project such that users are allowed to link Asterisk with specific libraries and
> distribute the resulting files.
> As such, we've modified the Asterisk license [3] to read the
> following:
> 
> "Specific permission is also granted to link Asterisk with OpenSSL, OpenH323,
> UniMRCP, and/or the UW IMAP Toolkit and distribute the resulting binary
> files."
> 
> This should make it easier for participants of both projects to use Asterisk
> with UniMRCP without violating the licenses of either project.
> 
> Hopefully this e-mail and the exception in the LICENSE file clears up any
> ambiguity that people may have had regarding Asterisk and the UniMRCP
> project.
> 
> Thanks -
> 
> Matt
> 
> [1] http://www.unimrcp.org/
> [2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
> [3] http://svn.asterisk.org/svn/asterisk/trunk/LICENSE
> 
> 
> --
> Matthew Jordan
> Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager
> 445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA Check us out at:
> http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org
> 
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