[asterisk-users] Re: Asterisk Faxing Support

[Lacy Moore]

Lee Howard wrote:
> 
> Yes, I do suspect that Digium sees things this way.
> 
> Maybe I'm too much of a free-thinker - too believing in the open-source
> philosophy, but I would like to think that this is not neccesarily
> true.  I would like to think that they could host and support a
> non-disclaimed GPL Asterisk - having features that ABE does not - and
> they would profit from that.  Still, they could ask for disclaimers, and
> undoubtedly many, many people here love Digium enough to do that even if
> they aren't required to do so in order to see their contribution
> integrated upstream.  In the cases where a contributor will not disclaim
> the contribution to Digium then Digium could make some attempt to obtain
> a license for ABE from the contributor (and I expect that this case
> would be extremely rare - but perhaps appropriate for cases like
> spandsp/rxfax/txfax), Digium could write their own rendition of the
> contribution, or ABE could just do without it.
> 
> The way I see it, if Asterisk improves or gets some new feature or
> increases its exposure then Digium (and every other business
> commercially involved with Asterisk) will benefit more from that than if
> the improvement had not taken place.
> 
> Certainly I think that it's fair to say that some contributions will not
> be disclaimed in the scenario I outlined that would have been disclaimed
> in the present scenario.  I think that depends on how well Digium does
> on keeping the Asterisk users loyal and willing to repay them in kind. 
> However, in the end, even if they don't do a good job at that, I think
> that a better Asterisk means a happier Digium... even if that means that
> there is some differences between ABE and Asterisk GPL.
> 


I couldn't agree more with this.  I also think that they could charge
the same amount for commercial support (and not the actual product) of
Asterisk with a certain feature set (i.e., similar to ABE today) and
make just as much money, if not more, than now.

This whole concept being similar to RedHat.  I may be mistaken, but I
don't think they have dual licenses.  I was under the impression that
RedHat sold support for RedHat Linux, not the actual product.

Then again, what do I know?  There's no MBA diploma hanging on my wall.