[Asterisk-Dev] Petition for IAX firmware

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, Nick Bachmann wrote:

> Matt Klein wrote:
> 
> >
> > Keep in mind that Digium should obey the GPL as should anyone else 
> > using their non-commercial products.
> 
> Well, maybe they "should," but remember that Digium owns the copyright 
> to Asterisk and thus can license it however they want.
<snip>

> I'm not sure what you're refering to here (which is why I don't like 
> top-posting)... the specs for what?  Zaptel cards? They don't really 
> have firmware.
> 
> > It has nothing to do with 'buying Digium products'. It's about 
> > legalities. All of the HW makers must open source every aspect of 
> > their modifications if their work is derived from a GPL project.
> 
> Yes, if it's someone else's GPL project.  But if they own the copyright, 
> they are free to license their changes however they want, including not 
> at all.
Y'all are very confused.

1) Zapata Telephony (and the Tormenta cards) was a project to design an
extremely low-cost telephony card that actually predates Asterisk. (Or was
started at about same time by unrelated people). Original torisa card was
designed by Jim Dixon & others and the all the schematics necessary to
fabricate it was released under GPL.  Asterisk had a driver for it about a
year later.

2) Digium started manufacturing cards from Zapata designs and had a hand
in design of the follow-up card (Tormenta 2, also known as tor2 and
T400P). To my knowledge, they released all the fixes (VHDL FPGA firmware
etc) back to the community.

3) The new[er] Digium (T405/T410/TE) cards are closed-source and are based
on their own proprietary design. 

-alex