[Asterisk-Dev] code theft again?

[Daniel Pocock]

Bruce Ferrell wrote:

> Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday 13 July 2005 01:20, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 12:12:19AM -0500, Steven wrote:
>>>
>>>> It would be
>>>> very easy for a large number of us to file suit in our jurisdiction
>>>> simultaneously. Even if we didn't prosecute hard, the cost of
>>>> defending a 30-50 lawsuits in 20 or more jurisdictions would
>>>> bankrupt a smallish business, or at least force them to come clean
>>>> quickly.
>>>
>>>
>>> Call me naive, but I'd mainly like to see companies copmplying with
>>> the license (and contributing their changes back to the community).
>>> Law suits are just one way of forcing them to do so. They should be
>>> used as a last resort *after* the company has been contacted and has
>>> been made aware of the fact that complying with the license isn't
>>> normaly that difficult.
>>
>>
>>
>> How, pray tell, are we going to know when to do that if Digium is not
>> keeping us in the loop with respect to individual company negotiations?
>>
>
> Well, maybe all that can/should be done is to report the suspected 
> unauthorized use to Digium and let it go at that.  Unsatisfying to be 
> sure but given that Mark and Digium seems to be the final arbitors of 
> this, I'm not sure what else there is to do.
>
> I know I'm working with a system for a client that I have questions 
> about, but I'm not about to jepordize my client on something I don't 
> know about for certain.  And Digium certainly doesn't (or can't by 
> contractual agreement) publicize what companies have commercially 
> licensed Asterisk.


Maybe there needs to be a separate CVS repository for pure GPL code.  
People who want their code (and any derivitive works) to stay in the 
public domain and avoid all this confusion and commercial secrecy could 
put their code there.  I imagine distributions like Debian would simply 
ship Asterisk as two packages - `asterisk-core.deb' and 
`asterisk-modules-pure-gpl.deb' perhaps.

Of course, it would probably only work if entire modules were written 
that way (eg, an entire channel driver or an entire codec module).

Regards,

Daniel
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