[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, William Waites wrote:

> On October 8, 2005 12:55, Jeremy McNamara wrote:
> > William Waites wrote:
> > >And if you insist on playing the "use IP as a big stick" game, you
> > >had
> > > better make damn sure that Asterisk is non-infringing in any way of
> > > anybody elses claims...
> >
> > If you have any substance to this claim, bring it.
> 
> Any such substance would best be brought in counter-suit if you (or
> Digium)  choses to harrass a fork with lawyers.
What the heck is wrong with you people? 

I blame the MTV generation for lack of respect for any kind of 
intellectual property, and the gradual slide from "oh, so I can download 
music for free" to "I can make money on someone's work without paying".

The copyright *is* what keeps the GPL software free. If you do not respect
copyright of the creators of Asterisk (and the licensing terms they
require), what do you respect? Why would anyone want to deal with you?  
Where will you stop? What is stopping you from releasing your own
"proprietary" openpbx, since you have made it abundantly clear you don't
care about GPL or copyrights of Digium and other contributors?

I will be the second in line (after jerjer :) to serve you (and your
hosting company) with DMCA notice if I see a binary that contains my
contributions and GPL-incompatible software, of whatever kind.

Respect for the laws is what keeps us from stealing, whether this is real
property or intellectual property. You might not like the fact that
licensing for H323/OpenSSL is not compatible with GPL - but it won't
change the fact. Now, the same copyright laws that prevent Microsoft from
releasing proprietary version of Asterisk are preventing you from
releasing binaries containing asterisk. Yes, it is inconvenient. So work
around it, via woomera/openh323 or other things that do not infringe on
copyrights of authors.

--
Alex Pilosov    | DSL, Colocation, Hosting Services
President       | alex at pilosoft.com    877-PILOSOFT x601
Pilosoft, Inc.  | http://www.pilosoft.com