[Asterisk-Dev] voicemail message number limits

[Peter Svensson]

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 dking at pimpsoft.com wrote:

> Under the same thought signing away your rights to the work lets 
> digum to take asterisk out of gpl at will, perhaps after the open 
> source community has made it a viable and over all profitable 
> software platform?

To a very large extent it _is_ Digium that develops Asterisk.

> I think the licensing is just a ruse to steal the software in a legal 
> way at some future date while allowing them to keep a public domain 
> source branch they can do as they please with, IMHO.

So what if they offer non-gpl:ed versions that allow proprietary 
extensions to be made? As long as Digium offers their version as gpl as 
well we are not that bad off, the rest of us will only miss some 
extensions made by those vendors. If Digium stops providing a gpl:ed 
version at all the last gpl:Ed version can be forked and the community can 
still work from that point on.

So, yes, you give some of your work away to Digium in a way that allows 
them to sell it for proprietary use. This is the price you pay to have 
your work included in the Digium release of Asterisk and having it be 
maintained by their developers. If this is not acceptable to you noone is 
forcing you to do so. You can certainly maintain it yourself on your own 
version of Asterisk. 

Peter