[Asterisk-Dev] zapata, zaptel, GPL etc

[Steven Critchfield]

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 08:36, Vinod Sankar wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I purchased 2 E1 cards from Digium and am trying to integrate
> it into our proprietary commercial VoIP software. I'm very confused
> about the licensing requirements for using the appropriate libraries
> for this. There is zapata code from zapatatelephony that seems 
> to be in public domain, but only available on FreeBSD, and there
> is zaptel on linux which is GPL. I'm using linux. Does anybody know 
> what libraries are needed so that the VoIP software can simply 'open'
> the E1 ISDN PRI voice circuits and 'play' or 'record' voice streams
> from and to it ? Can I use these libraries without making my whole
> app GPL ? 

>From the zap.c file in the zapata library that I used up until Mark
rewrote it into chan_zap...
 *  The technologies, software, hardware, designs, drawings, scheumatics, board
 *  layouts and/or artwork, concepts, methodologies (including the use of all
 *  of these, and that which is derived from the use of all of these), all other
 *  intellectual properties contained herein, and all intellectual property
 *  rights have been and shall continue to be expressly for the benefit of all
 *  mankind, and are perpetually placed in the public domain, and may be used,
 *  copied, and/or modified by anyone, in any manner, for any legal purpose,
 *  without restriction. 

This means if you use the zapata library to access the device, and since
you won't be compiling against the zaptel headers, you won't be linking
to any GPL software. You should be just fine. Of course if you want to
help with asterisks VoIP stacks, that would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>