[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

[Dinesh Nair]

On 10/09/05 05:44 Kevin P. Fleming said the following:
> There is no 'legality', there is only license conformance or 
> non-conformance. Non-conformance to the license exposes you to action 

apologies for using the wrong terminology.

> All of this is only relevant (as another poster has posted) to 
> redistribution; making modifications on your own system and using the 
> results does not in itself violate the GPL. It may, however, violate the 

which is what some people do, i.e. selling preinstalled and preconfigured 
asterisk on freebsd packaged solutions (with server hardware and digium 
TE4XXP cards to boot) to customers and providing the source to it.

> It would be highly counter-productive for Digium (or any other Asterisk 
> copyright holders, of which there are a large number) to take action 
> against a Linux distribution vendor, FreeBSD or any other 'packager' for 
> using the Asterisk trademark on binaries they distribute to their users. 

it would, but then when a vacuum exists in this scenario, one would be 
better to err on the side of caution and not do anything which would put it 
in a grey area and open for interpretation. my stance on this would be 
better to be safe than sorry and to make absolutely 100% sure that no 
license non-compliance has happened.

i sincerely hope that digium clears this licensing/trademark mess up 
soonest. otherwise, the use of openh323/openssl with a modified/patched 
asterisk would be in question even if the terms of the GPL were adhered to.

> This is similar to the situation between RedHat and CentOS (and the 
> other RHEL clones)... they can distribute binaries made from the 
> identical source code, but they cannot call it 'RedHat <anything>' 
> without RedHat's permission, since that is a trademark.

that's a little different. in that scenario, no waivers are in place. so 
while one cant call it Redhat, one can redistribute the software provided 
that the GPL is adherred to.

in the asterisk scenario, the special waiver given for openh323 and openssl 
is what confuses the matter. a modified but GPL-compliant asterisk would 
not be able to be distributed if it was linked to openh323.

-- 
Regards,                           /\_/\   "All dogs go to heaven."
dinesh at alphaque.com                (0 0)    http://www.alphaque.com/
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