[Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation

[Tom Lahti]

>Are you saying that those of us that are using the product should not be 
>allowed to voice our opinions about its licensing, development and 
>maintenance? That we should all just shut up and take whatever Mark & co. 
>give us? If that's the case, then this is most definitely NOT an 
>open-source project at all.

Not at all.  I believe you should voice whatever opinion you have, but you 
should bear in mind while doing so that Mark is under no obligation to even 
listen to you, and should not be.  Those like Joe seem to be searching for 
some _legal_ way to do just that, which disgusts me because I know when 
they are successful it sets a legal precedent that could be used against 
_me_.  As long as you aren't pursuing some legal angle whereby you can take 
over control of Asterisk, whether in part or in whole, then bitch 
away!  That's what free speech is all about.

Let me try to make my point about property rights as clear as I can.  The 
right to property means "the right to use and dispose of" the property.  If 
someone is holding a gun to your head telling you what to do with it, it 
isn't _really_ yours, no matter how much lip service is paid to the fact 
that you're the one actually touching the property.  If someone is forcing 
you (and I mean "force" in the truest sense, i.e. the laws of a government) 
to destroy your property or hand it over to someone else, then it is really 
the governments and they are just letting you pretend to own it.  A good 
example of this is the current state of the ILECs in the US.  What do you 
think would happen if SBC, Qwest etc. woke up tomorrow and blew up all 
their switches and said "well, they belonged to us, we paid excise taxes on 
them, we could do with them what we want."  There would be a whole lot of 
board members in jail, for starters, for destroying the "public" telephone 
network.

Well, who does it belong to, the "public", or the phone company?  It can't 
be both.  Only one of them has the right to blow it up, and I'll give you 
one guess as to which.

Property rights are not a matter of degree.  You cannot be "sort of" 
pregnant, you can't be "somewhat" dead, and you can't "kind of" own 
something, where others are partially in control of its use and 
disposal.  It's either yours or it isn't.

Communism, ala the FSF and Stallman, don't work.  Look at the history of 
communist states that have existed and those that are left and tell me that 
system works.  I'd really love a good laugh.  If you don't think the FSF is 
a communist establishment, go read the GNU Philosophy on the FSF web 
site.  Everything is about making the "collective", the "public", or 
whatever else you want to call it, more important than the individual, and 
that is the basic principle upon which communism is built.  Their idea is 
that noone has a right to his own ideas; that whatever you as developers 
may dream up ought to be the rightful property of the "public", and 
Stallman says so over and over and over.  And where does that leave you, 
the developer, motivationally?  Where does that leave you at the end of the 
month when its time to pay rent and buy groceries?  It doesn't take rocket 
science to figure out why it doesn't and _cannot_ work.

The only rational way for men to deal with each other is through trading 
value for value, which is why I said the Asterisk licensing sets up a 
trade.  You can use Asterisk not really for "free", but in exchange for 
what Mark can add to Asterisk along the way, rather than being compensated 
monetarily.


--
Tom