[asterisk-dev] Support for Dialogic DM3 cards

[Steven Critchfield]

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 11:16 -0700, Anton wrote:
> I'm cool as ice. And just sorry that project is not so 
> rapidly growing into the best possible PBX is JUST because 
> many of the developers do not want their work to be used 
> not in the fair way. While for example I'll happily release 
> any of my code under GNU (in other words to give it for 
> free to everyone, to anytype of usage), I will not be happy 
> to just donate it to some commercial, to be (possibly) used 
> as their solely property in the future. That is my point.

That is fine that you don't want your work to get closed sourced up and
taken private. What many of us have decided though is to be able to
license the work we do as GPL primarely and privately to Digium. This
allows only Digium to take a copy of the code and use it with GPL
unfriendly licensed other products. Digium and other commercial
companies still have to allow asterisk to remain a GPL product for any
other use.

Consider what has been done for Digium to be a weirdish mix of GPL and a
BSD license. Specifically we all have a GPL code base with one specific
entity allowed to treat it as private code. That one specific entity has
been a very good benefactor for this community and has paid the
development costs for a great portion if not a majority of the code base
you use.

And has been pointed out before, there are ways of contributing your
code that doesn't require it be incorporated into the Digium tree of
asterisk. It requires you keep it maintained to the current releases and
doesn't guarantee you will be considered when changes are made that
break your functionality. There are many GPL only add-ons to asterisk
that are maintained outside of the asterisk tree.

-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>