[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

[Paul]

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> Paul wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> There is a huge difference.
>
> An original Asterisk distribution plus patches is still called 
> Asterisk, since it is the source code that was distributed by the 
> owner of the Asterisk trademark.
>
> If you modify the code and distribute it, you cannot call it Asterisk, 
> since you are not the trademark owner. Once the name 'Asterisk' is not 
> applicable to the source code, the GPL exceptions that Digium has 
> granted do not apply, since they are granted to 'Asterisk', not to 
> 'the collection of source files known as Asterisk'. It's legal 
> semantics, but it's very important legal semantics :-)

The debian way is to distribute the upstream source tarball and 
patchset. From what you are saying a linux distro that only distributes 
a tarball of the patched source would not be able to call the package 
asterisk. That sounds acceptable to me. What about the ready-to-run 
binary packages I got from debian? Those are called asterisk.

So if put copies of official asterisk source tarballs out along with 
patch files that can be called asterisk. So what if I also offer 
binaries for different distros. Seems to me I would get the same rights 
that debian and fedora projects get.

My point is that it could be considered a fork but the means of 
distribution allows it to be called a modified asterisk.