[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Kevin Walsh]

Tzafrir Cohen [tzafrir at cohens.org.il] wrote:
> Disclaimers aside, who has the copyrights in those cases?
> 
> Digium currently holds copyrights and/or is allowed to relicense the
> full asterisk codebase as is currently distributed in the asterisk
> tarballs on ftp.asterisk.org and also all the code in the asterisk CVS
> on cvs.digium.org (any better definition?) .
> 
Just to be clear, the perpetual agreement doesn't force a transfer
of copyright;  The author gets to keep the copyright, and can do
whatever he likes with the code.  The shorter disclaimer puts the
copyright into the public domain.

The perpetual agreement gives "the owner" two main rights.  Firstly
paragraph 1 allows the code, and all future Asterisk-related code,
written by that contributor to be closed by "the owner".  Secondly,
paragraphs 2 and 5(a) force the contributor to report all future
changes and/or enhancements to save "the owner" the hassle of having
to scour future forks looking for code that they might be interested
in folding into their proprietary release.

The second disclaimer (the short one) simply dumps all of your changes
and enhancements into the public domain for anyone to use in a
proprietary product.  Of course, the only people who would know about
this would be the signer and the company to which the document was sent.

The short disclaimer is sufficiently woolly to allow for all future
changes to a fork to be folded back into the binary release, although
it doesn't include an obligation to report all such changes.

Once signed, neither agreement has an exit clause or time limit, so
neither of them can be cancelled.  Maybe that is legal in Alabama
(or Delaware), but I wouldn't really want to have to travel there to
find out.

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