[Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation

[Joe Greco]

> >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.

What exactly are you accusing me of?  I don't even get it.

Just for the record, if I'm looking for some legal way to do something,
then it'll be in the hands of our lawyers, and you'll most likely find
out on letterhead or by being served.  ...  but that's not applicable
here, since I'm not.

I was at one point looking for a legal way to contribute a few Asterisk
changes.  I checked the disclaimers.  I knew we couldn't sign them.  End
of that.  However, I believe it's worth discussing the reasons that
BSD- or GPL-licensed changes to a GPL'd project would not be accepted by
that project, not on merit of the changes, but because of rights.

> 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.

Interestingly enough, that might only be a problem for an ILEC.  CLEC's
are generally not obligated to provide service (or even to exist).  We've
seen CLEC's fold and terminate service in the past.

> 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.

Heh.  The spammers would like to "own" your computer in that way.  ;-)

> 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.

I came to a somewhat similar conclusion years ago.

However, I hope that you would concede that there is a certain 
attractiveness to the general philosophy.  So much software is locked up
for no good reason.  Closed development is a waste of resources.  Think
of where we might be if people weren't busily duplicating work.

On the flip side, we have the BSD license "capitalism", which relies perhaps
too heavily on the willingness of contributors to contribute changes back.

There's no real middle ground.

If we lived in a world where programmers were tenured positions and did not
have to worry about those pesky business fundamentals, I might actually be
persuaded that the GPL was an ideal license.  As it is, I like to believe
that most people are inherently good, and as such, I believe that the BSD
license is an acceptable license, since people can and do contribute
changes back to BSD licensed projects.

In the meantime, we all need to make a living - including the programmers.

> 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.

Let's complete the loop.  There's nothing wrong with that.  However, I am
putting forth the idea that you should be unambiguously aware of your
contribution back to Mark.  Would that be fair?

... 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.