[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

Sun Oct 9 18:11:01 MST 2005

On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 19:48 -0400, Tony Fontoura wrote:
> If it is open, why ask for written consent?
> 

One issue that plagues many currently active gpl products is lack of a
paper trail to show that the contributor of the code actually had the
legal right to contribute it.  Patent law does still exist in some
places when talking about source code, copyright is another issue.  Lack
of a paper trail on whom submitted what, when and all that can make it
difficult should anything go legal. 

Any GPL product can directly rip software from another GPL product
without any problems, as per the terms of the GPL (whether or not the
GPL is valid is left for another discussion).  When code is ripped
(whether verbatim or derrived), or submitted by a developer, credit
needs to be given (this part is the same whether BSD-style or GPL).  

Asking for written consent helps to preserve that right for the
developer.  Now some projects (asterisk is one) where there is a dual
license, consent needs to be given for all the available licensing
terms, gpl only, gpl+other, other only, etc.  In some instances it needs
to be done so that there is proof that the developer consented to
anything other than GPL.  This prevents the developer from changing
their mind, this prevents the developer from claiming they didnt know it
would be dual licensed, etc.

If openpbx.org just takes the GPL asterisk tarball and works with that,
no one has any claim if the code they get is GPLed.  The GPL seeks to
prevent developers from protecting their code from forks and other uses
like that.  There is one caveat that exists however, the terms that
asterisk has for its GPL variant (license licked to specific version or
not, which version, etc) must be the same with the fork project.  

This particular issue has the potential to get other projects into hot
water (unless the blatent code theft continues as it has in the past).
Take the linux kernel, at one time it was any version of the GPL, code
was submitted, then it was locked to version 2 only, more code was
submitted.  If they decide to go with GPL version 3 they better have a
good paper trail of everyone that submitted code allowing them to do
that or they can be in some trouble for using a license of the GPL other
than what the code submitter was aware of at the time of submission.
This is already a potential problem (although no one seems to care at
this point) since they did change the terms of the license at one point.
Alan Cox seems to have a clever way of getting around this (and possibly
others higher up in the linux decision making tree).  They will
'rewrite' submitted code, omit the original copyright holders name for
that section of code, and place their own name instead.  Simply changing
variable names and reformatting a for loop shouldnt count as 'all new
code' but Alan has done this a few times so I guess in his mind it
does.  

If openpbx.org takes the same approach and starts to claim copyright
then there is cause for action against them, until they do that however
I see no problem with a fork.  Quite often forks fail because they were
started for the wrong reasons.  I am unsure of their reasons (and dont
really care) however rather than see this as 'competition' or anything
generally bad it might be a good thing, get some people who do not like
a particular thing about asterisk to contribute, due to the parasitic
nature of the gpl itself, asterisk in its non business edition variant
can incorporate those changes or whatever into asterisk (ie users of
asterisk or digium itself).  And if there is a unified build environment
for asterisk then users with ABE can potentially download the modules
pre compiled for their version and use them internally.

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
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