[asterisk-users] Sangoma vs Digium: (was Re: ping too)

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 02:52:24PM -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> On Friday 05 October 2007 12:52:41 shadowym wrote:
> > I disagree with any argument for or against Digium in support of Asterisk
> > as much as I do for or against Sangoma or Rhino or one of the Chinese knock
> > offs in support of Asterisk.  Digium uses the open source community to
> > create better commercial software products and their licensing policies
> > reflect that whereby they own the code anyone contributes so it's not like
> > they don't benefit if you don't buy their hardware.
> 
> I try my best to stay out of these flame wars, but what you've expressed here
> is simply wrong.
> 
> When you contribute code to Asterisk, you retain ownership of your code.  You
> are NOT disclaiming the contribution; you are LICENSING the contribution.
> This is an important legal distinction, and all too often, it gets muddled by
> people who either do not understand the distinction or have ulterior motives.

This is correct for the contribution itself. But improvements to that
code could be taken privately.

To illustrate this: would it be possible for me to ocntribute the same
code to say, both Asterisk and chan_ss7[1] ? I could, as long as I'm the
author. But once either in Asterisk or in chan_ss7 there are some local
improvements over that code, I may no longer be in a posistion to send
my fixes to bith.

[1] Assume that there is indeed soemthing to be submitted to both
projects. Recall that chan_ss7 employs a similar licensing scheme to
Asterisk itself - requires relicensing of the code in order for the
contribution to get into the tree.


Anyway, the things that bothers me most about this is that the strange
license is "almost GPL" - close enough to GPL to make it incompatible
with a bunhc of licenses (and not even GPL3, which is nicer, in that
sense), but as it is not GPL, no other GPLed code could be used. Thus
the GPL pool cannot be tapped. And we resort to substitutes such as
editline.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen       
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