[Asterisk-Users] SysMaster and GPL Violation (lets think before we

[Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists]

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:18:14 +1300, Matt Riddell
<matt.riddell at sineapps.com> wrote:
> 
> If  you posted a mail saying that you thought Asterisk was crap and had
> signed this disclaimer, you could go to court.  Not that Digium would do
> that though.

That's not a very good example, in my view.

Let's try to find a more reasonable and realistic one, shall we?!

Let's say you are hiring somebody to make changes to Zaptel drivers to
accommodate certain features of the Japanese PSTN, the code is yours,
you paid for it, yet you want to see it in the Asterisk/Zaptel/Libpri
source tree anyway and so you disclaim it to Digium.

At the same time, one of Digium's competitors, ie Aculab, Brooktrout,
Odin, Sangoma, etc knocks on your door and they are willing to work
with your on support for Japanese telephone standards and go for
Japanese type approval

You may now want to make use of that code you paid for having
developed earlier to accommodate certain features for Japan, code
which has since been disclaimed to Digium.

Go and pay IP lawyers to evaluate the disclaimer against this scenario
and they will tell you that you are walking on very thin ice, that you
had better not disclaimed that code, that you should better not get
involved with other vendors in respect of what the disclaimed code
does.

They will tell you that it would have been better if you had released
the code under a LGPL or BSD license, thus allowing anybody to use it
with Zaptel and in fact allowing Digium to incorporate it into their
code base both for GPL and non-GPL releases.


Now, let me give you a real world example. Voicetronix, a competitor
of Digium in analog telephony boards, have developed and LGPL released
a decoder function for the encoded Japanese Caller ID signal.

This code has been debugged fairly well and it is beign used in
various commerically run installations of Bayonne based IVR and
callback systems here in Japan.

It would be beneficial to Asterisk if this code was to be incorporated
into Zaptel, to give Zaptel a built-in ability to decode the Japanese
Caller ID signal.

Yet, this will not happen because Mark wants Voicetronix to disclaim
their code. Voicetronix have already released this code under LGPL.
How unreasonable to ask for more. Would Digium disclaim some of their
own code to Voicetronix for inclusion in their own OpenPBX software so
they can sell it under a non-GPL license? I would think not.

If Voicetronix was to sign Digium's disclaimer, it would have the
potential to underminde their own ability to compete.

Digium are being unreasonable here to expect their competitors to
disclaim code they have already released under LGPL and Digium's
refusal to incorporate such LGPL code into Zaptel is a loss for
Asterisk and a loss for the community.

I wonder how we got ncurses and readline into Asterisk. Has Digium
obtained disclaimers for those LGPLed libraries, too? I don't think
so.

As it stands, it is not a matter of trust only whether you can sign
this disclaimer or not.

rgds
benjk
-- 
Sunrise Telephone Systems, 9F Shibuya Daikyo Bldg., 1-13-5 Shibuya,
Tokyo, Japan.

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