[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

[Paul]

Jeremy McNamara wrote:

> Paul wrote:
>
>> The patent owners would view locally compiled GPL asterisk and a GPL 
>> fork of asterisk equally. If they permit me to buy codec licenses 
>> from digium and use them with an asterisk that I have modified there 
>> is no reason to prevent me from doing the same with a fork.
>
>
>
>
> You do not understand.  Only the copyright holder of the GPL software 
> can allow non-gpl software to link with their GPL Licensed software.
>
> Open H.323, Open SSL and G.729 are not GPL licensed, hence only Digium 
> can wave the GPL rights for those features to exist in Asterisk - Any 
> forked project does not have the right to grant such exceptions.
>
Jeremy, I fully understand your explanation.

The question that raises is: How does a GPL fork differ enough to lose 
those waivers? Suppose I write several thousand lines of GPL patches to 
a GPL-released asterisk. I put the patch set and the original asterisk 
tarball on my ftp/http servers. I don't see much difference between that 
and a forked project as far as license issues go.