Licensing (was Re: [Asterisk-Dev] voicemail message number limits)

[Mark Spencer]

> why hasn't anyone brought up the SCO factor?  by having everyone 
> disclaim (meaning they once *claimed*) rights to the additions, it frees 
> digium from being sued.  where as the submitter, having lied about 
> owning/creating/submitting would be a wonderful target.

The SCO factor is a side effect of the initial planning -- it was not one 
of my initial motivators, although it did come up before the SCO case 
(when in discussions with one of our attorneys who was trying to 
understand Open Source software).

This is the last comment I plan to make on this topic, having clearly made 
a mistake by thinking that dking was actually simply misunderstanding the 
disclaimers and not just trolling.  I have read many of the insightful 
(and not so insightful) responses on this thread and am actually very 
impressed with the general understanding of both our purpose in the 
disclaimers and in understanding how the GPL guarantees their rights -- 
disclaimers or not.

As it turns out, we are not as innovative in this dual licensing strategy 
as one might think.  MySQL clearly has taken the lead here and has done an 
amazing job of building a business which revolves around both the support 
and licensing models in an industry which contains a great deal of both 
closed and Open Source code.  MySQL has clearly built a successful 
business and has found way to make money while producing Open Source code, 
and to a great degree they serve as a good example for Digium as a 
company. Notably, even their "commercial" MySQL version is not feature 
differentiated from the Open Source one -- it's just a closed source 
version of the same product, for a closed source market.

I hope this helps people understand where we're coming from, and again, I 
hope that we will always be able to continue to do the "right thing" and 
keep people supporting the work we do.

Mark