[Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Sat Nov 13 07:46:42 MST 2004


> The reason these threads end up rambling on far too much is people post 
> without reading anything pertinent in the previsious messages.
> 
> SysMaster has been vehemently denying their systems are based on 
> Asterisk, so they have *not* been making any source available, or 
> telling customers where you might find it. However, their system does 
> nothing whatsoever to disguise that is really is *. They seem far too 
> lazy to do any actual work, so probably the code they use is * without 
> any modifications. However, the licence requires they tell customers how 
> to get obtain unmodified source code.

In the event that Digium has not licensed Asterisk to them under a 
non-GPL license:

No, there is no requirement that they tell customers how to obtain
unmodified source code (assuming you mean generic Asterisk)...  there
is, however, a requirement that they offer up the source code that they 
used to build their Asterisk executables.

If that happens to be the same as a distributed Asterisk version, then
there is no functional difference, of course, and compliance with the
GPL is pretty much as simple as offering people tarballs of that.  But
merely referring people to the Asterisk web site might not be sufficient
compliance...  I know the GPL people were debating that at one point.

If they've made changes, however, then those changed sources must be 
made available.  That might be interesting stuff, and is precisely the
sort of crowbar that the GPL is intended to be.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.



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