[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 14.0.1 Now Available

[marek cervenka]

+1

please respect Digiums reasons or dont use binary codec


Dne 05/10/2016 v 11:05 Tzafrir Cohen napsal(a):
>
> 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
>