[asterisk-users] Mixing commercial/SVN Asterisk

[Richard Kenner]

> It is frustrating to me as we are encouraged to upgrade due to security
> issues but if we want to use this particular Digium product we cannot. I
> have chosen to upgrade as we have not purchased Fax for Asterisk and as
> we are unable to evaluate it I doubt we will. (Not to be snarky but I
> don't think I'm interested in buying a product that has been
> incompatible with its intended companion's official release for nearly
> four months now with no public progress on making it compatible,
> especially when those releases are suggested to resolve security
> issues.)

This also raises Free Software / Open Source issues and is one of the
reasons why part of the GCC community was against any "plug-in" concept.
It means that if you choose to use these proprietary products, you lose a
large part of the benefit of Asterisk being Free Software because you can't
know what you can safely change without causing everything to break because
of the piece of proprietary software that you don't have the source for.

Does anybody know Stallman's views on this?  If not, maybe I'll ask him
the next time we communicate.