[Asterisk-Users] Re: Advice on OS Choice

[Steven Critchfield]

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 17:23 -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:

> Say in the case of Asterisk you modified and improved the conferencing
> capability, or voicemail, those modifications are made to existing
> features and are expected to go back into the GPL source. Final
> judgement is made by the GPL core distribution team to incorporate or
> not.
> 
> Should you take and build a capability like Billing or another
> conferencing capability, or call transfer to your liking on top of the
> asterisk system. This in not required to be reviewed or submitted to
> become open source. It is your own software capability to do with what
> you want. Keep it proprietary or open source it. Your choice.

The GPL only really matters if you distribute software. As was mentioned
before, you are well within your rights and within the rights given you
by the GPL to never distribute your changes. As long as you never
distribute your changes, they can stay private. As soon as you
distribute your change, you must make the code available as well to
those who get the binary at the minimum. At that point it is possible
for those who receive your changes to return the changes to the original
project.  

As for your idea about the billing or confencing app and it's licensing,
it depends on the closeness of the app. A new conferncing app would
require you to link with GPL code and would necessitate it to also be
GPLed. A billing app that only deals with the CDRs could be any license
as it doesn't link with the GPL code. 
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>