[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 14.0.1 Now Available

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 08:57:47AM +0100, Lefteris Zafiris wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2016, at 18:10, George Joseph wrote:
> > The lawyers made us. ;-)
> >  In order to lessen the risk of future legal action, the codec reports
> >  anonymous stats to Digium once per day that contain the maximum
> >  number of simultaneous opus channels in the past 24 hours.  Again,
> >  totally anonymous. We don't even record ip addresss, just a uuid and
> >  count. To protect that mechanism we had to do a binary distribution.
> 
> By a quick look at the codec_opus.so file we see that the function
> license_count_send() uses libcurl to make a POST request to
> 'https://stats.asterisk.org/license' with the following headers/data:
> 
> Content-Type: application/json
> { "namespace": "codec_opus", "uuid": "%s", "high_water_mark": %d }
> 
> For those who feel uneasy about sending usage data to remote servers
> the readme
> http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/codec_opus/asterisk-14.0/x86-64/README
> states that 'If the module fails to send usage statistics, it will
> NOT affect
> the operation of the Opus codec'
> So disabling this can be simply done by 

[snip explaining how to disable it]

No. Please don't go that way. If you respect Digium's claim that a
patent license is needed, what you do here is a violation of in (in a
transitive manner). If you don't, why bother using their phoning-home
codec?

We use free software. We use quality software that does what it is
suppose to do. Software that we can change when needed. That we can
rebuild for other platforms (and odd build flags) when needed.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I happen to know a bit about copyrights
and patents. Some of it may actually be correct. I'm a programmer who
does not deal with the business side of things. I'm also employed by a
certain company, as my email clearly states. That say, I do clearly care
about Asterisk specifically and Free Software in general)

There are generally no copyright issues with the Opus codec. The issue
cited is claims of some unknown patents that are infridged by
implementing an Opus codec.

The developers of the codec state in the page about the license of the
codec[1] that this does not seem to be the case. Furthermore, several
big companies with pockets big enough to be sued (see names mentioned
there) are likewise confident enough in using it.

Opus is to become the new standard audio codec. It was designed from
grounds up not only to be a good codec, but also a codec that is not
under the control of any specific entity (or even a group such as
MPEG-LA).

I appreciate Digium's position. But I disagree. The company I work for 
does not believe there are patent issues with codec_opus and we ship
a version (based roughly on [2] and later [3] (Thanks to Sean Bright and
to Alexander Traud for maintaining them). You can find our RPM packaging
of Asterisk 11 and 13 with that patch (it does take a small bits of
maintenance) in [4] (may hopefully change in the future if I switch to
cgit).

Beyond my ideals of supporting Free Software, I also believe that
providing an Opus Codec provides a better product for my company. I
encourge you all to provide Asterisk with the supperior Opus codec. If
it's good enough for Mozilla and Google, it's good enough for me. Yes, I
care about Asterisk. But if it comes to a proprietary software that
calls home, then things don't work well.

I personally don't look at Asterisk 14 for now, as it is not LTS.
Has anybody updated the version of the patch for 14 and/or master?

[1] https://www.opus-codec.org/license/

[2] https://github.com/seanbright/asterisk-opus

[3] https://github.com/traud/asterisk-opus

[4] http://git.xorcom.com/?p=rpm/asterisk.git

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com