[Asterisk-biz] Asterisk Ffork - OpenPBX.org

[trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com]

On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 09:58 -0500, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> Peter Nixon wrote:
> 
> > So what you are saying is that what Novell and SUSE do by distributing 
> > Asterisk with OpenH323, Spandsp, BRIStuff and a few other patches all 
> > together on their FTP site, CDs and DVDs (not to mention all of the 3rd party 
> > mirrors) and calling them collectively Asterisk is illegal. Given that they 
> > have been doing so for longer than 12 months and there is no way that Digium 
> > could have not know about this has Digium filed suit against Novell for this 
> > (According to you) Trademark and Copyright infringing behavior?
> 
> I'm saying that it is possible for this behavior to be considered a 
> license/trademark infringement, if Digium chose to do so. Then again, 
> IANAL, so I can't say with certainty that this is true... we will need 
> to get some more clear trademark licensing documentation written before 
> anyone could say conclusively exactly what sort of modifications are 
> allowed without infringement.


The FSF woint back anyone that sues for license/trademark infringment
against someone who bundled GPL code under the terms of hte GPL.  And it
would be silly for anyone to attempt to sue over that, while it may not
get the GPL reviewed as legally valid, the mere fact that the authors
took an overt act to allow exactly that type of actions, to sue for
someone taking that actions would just be insane.

For anyone that submitted code under the terms of the GPL they
specifically stated they wanted forks to be possible.  For the original
authors who selected the GPL they specifically wanted forks to be a
possiblity.  Why now people are so concerned that a fork is occuring is
beyond me.  The GPL claims to protect this type of activity
specifically.
-- 
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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