[asterisk-biz] Asterisk Licensing Question

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 06:42 -0500, Steve Totaro wrote:
> Contacting Digium sales would be a great place to start. 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Saad Faisal [mailto:saad.faisal at amzxs.com] 
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 6:46 AM
> > To: 'Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion'
> > Subject: RE: [asterisk-biz] Asterisk Licensing Question
> > 
> > Just to elaborate a little more, we intend to use and bundle 
> > Asterisk for commercial purposes with the Open Source version 
> > ( not to be confused with Business Edition available from Digium).
> > 

Since its not asterisk business edition, it falls under the gpl (sorta,
the issues with the gpl appear to be getting resolved though).

The gpl allows you to sell products, so long as you make the source
available for what you sell (you are only required to distribute the
source to those that you distribute binaries to).  This is similar to
how redhat sells their distributions.  According to the FSF you are free
to include commercial software on the same distribution so long as it
forms a "mere aggregation" and isnt part and parcel with the GPL
software.  

The gpl is viewable at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html (ver 2 which
covers most of asterisk).  

licensing at fsf.org will answer your questions, however if its for
commercial purposes they will require a fee to do that.  You may also
forward that license to your lawyer and have them decide what you are
and are not allowed to do.  

The current distribution of asterisk contains GPL, LGPL, 4 clause BSD
(NetBSD), and possibly other software, however when its all distributed
together the effective license is supposed to be the most restrictive
one, ie the GPL (section 2c of the gpl).  The 4 clause BSD stuff cant be
licensed under the GPL (due to section 7 of the gpl) as such until that
code is replaced technically no one has any right to use or distribute
GPL asterisk becuase of a faulty license.  As stated above this appearrs
to be a work in progress, much has been done over the last 2 weeks to
get asterisk to comply with the GPL, so its only a matter of time before
the NetBSD code gets replaced.


-- 
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
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.sacaug.org/ Sacramento Asterisk Users Group
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