[asterisk-users] Digium and Asterisk

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Monday 26 November 2007 14:52, Eric "ManxPower" Wieling wrote:
> Eric "ManxPower" Wieling wrote:
> > Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> >> On Monday 26 November 2007 11:14, shadowym wrote:
> >>> On Monday, November 26, 2007 at 4:34 AM, Steven wrote:
> >>>> I also believe that supporting asterisk via a Digium purchase is the
> >>>> more "right" thing to do.
> >>>
> >>> How is buying Digium the “right” thing to do?  It is not like they are
> >>> a ‘true’ open source company.  More like proprietary that likes to use
> >>> the open source community to test.
> >>
> >> I beg your pardon.  If you're not just trolling, I'd like to hear just
> >> how you think Digium could be more of an open source company than they
> >> are now. Digium gives away its flagship platform, Asterisk, for free
> >> (under the GPL). I don't know how you could possibly get any more open
> >> source than that and still stay in business.
> >
> > I suspect the issue is, as always, the fact that 1) 3rd party GPL code
> > (like for example MySQL libraries, or any other GPL software) cannot be
> > added or linked to the Asterisk source tree and 2) all code added to the
> > Asterisk source tree must be disclaimed.
> >
> > The ONLY reason for these two items is that Digium has a dual license a
> > GPL license and a closed source license.
> >
> > Personally, I have no problem with this at all.  But some people seem to
> > think this makes Digium a closed source company.
>
> Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to clarify something.  When you
> "disclaim" code sent to Digium you have a choice in how you disclaim it.
>
> The first option is to just give Digium the copyright to your code.
> This is good for short or fairly obvious patches where you don't really
> care to keep the copyright to the code.

This was the disclaimer, but it is no longer an option.

> The second option, and the option that I choose, is to give Digium a
> royalty free LICENSE to use your code in anyway they see fit, but you
> keep the copyright.  This means that even though your code is in
> Asterisk, you are free to contribute that code to any project you want.

At this point, all contributions are licensed and the original contributor
retains copyright.

-- 
Tilghman