[Asterisk-Users] G.729 licensing -- an opinion

[Jan Rychter]

Seeing that many people here hit problems with activating their G.729
licenses, I decided to post my opinion.

I have purchased two G.729 licenses, for my private use. I did this even
though VoiceAge makes G.729 free for private use, as Windows
libraries. I guess a sufficiently motivated person could take the COFF
libraries, run them through objcopy on cygwin (producing ELF .o files)
and link them and use for free under Linux. For personal use, of course,
as any commercial usage still requires a valid license.

I wasn't sufficiently motivated, so I just went ahead and purchased the
licenses. Much to my surprise, after reading the monstrous licensing
agreement presented on screen, I have discovered that:

  -- the definition of "Software" is broad enough to cover ANY G.729
     software that I might ever be accessing or even *writing* myself,

  -- the "Improvement by Licensee" section is, well, rather "strange",

  -- the whole section 4 about "Payments by Credit Card" is something I
     am absolutely unwilling to agree to, having already paid for the
     license. This section has probably been left in by accident, but it
     exposes me to serious financial risk.

Overall, I do not understand how anybody can expect me to run completely
unknown binary software that even Digium says they don't know what it
does, and which at a first glance:

   a) accesses files on my hard drive,
   b) accesses my SCSI devices,
   c) accesses my IDE devices,
   d) possibly accesses other devices via ioctl() calls,
   e) contains encryption code,
   f) possibly transmits sensitive information outside of my
      network.

I have purchased a _codec_, which means encoding and decoding
software. I did not expect any other functionality. I do not have the
habit of running this sort of unknown "black-box" code on my machines.

I'm not even mentioning the fact that the whole licensing is rather
limited -- you can't move the license to another machine, and if you
modify your hardware, your license will probably break, and you'll have
downtime.

I've found the licensing completely unacceptable, didn't accept the
license, and asked for a refund, which Digium promptly granted.

Now, I must stress that Digium has always been extremely nice and
understanding, responded promptly and acted very fair. All of the
business I have ever done with Digium went extremely well. Also, as the
README file in the G.729 codec says -- the licensing is not really
Digium code. It's VoiceAge stuff.

Dear Digium! This piece of software is a disgrace. It really doesn't go
together with the rest of what you are doing, which is of excellent
quality. Please try to find a better solution.

One minor suggestion for the immediate future: placing the full
licensing agreement on the website would allow many people to read it
before deciding on the purchase.

--J.
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