[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Jay Milk]

Let me see if I can get my point across:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lee Howard [mailto:faxguy at howardsilvan.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:19 PM
> Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition
> 
> Jay Milk wrote:
> 
> >Who is getting the better end of the deal?
> >  
> >
> 
> Well, Digium, of course.

1. You have saved $5,000 by using free asterisk instead of some other
vendor's proprietary solution.
2. You have contributed $1,000 worth of your own code to the project.
3. Your code is now available to everyone for free.  It's also a small
part of a much larger commercial product that digium sells.

That still doesn't strike me as unfair.  Let me put it in other terms:

1. You get paid $100,000/yr as a programmer.
2. You have worked a year on Product X, bringing it to maturity.
3. Your employer sells Product X 20,000 times for $50 each.  After
marketing cost, infrastructure, materials, shipping, etc, they make
$500,000 of this product which they only paid you $100,000 for.

In the "real" world of commercial software design, companies take
financial risks by paying programmers to realize an idea.  In the case
of Asterisk, Digium took a *financial* risk by making their flagship
product available to everyone for free... hoping that grateful
individuals like yourself will improve upon it.

Now, if they were to close the source, I'd be upset.  But they don't...
Just cashing out on some of the risk they took a while back.  They're
making more money than you saved because they took the bigger risk.  

> >By OS'ing Asterisk, Digium has given many folks the means to earn a 
> >living
> 
> Yes, indeed, as well as themselves.

Of course... And that's exactly the risk they took.
 
> What I am saying, though, is that Digium didn't give out royalty-free 
> proprietary licenses to Asterisk, instead, they gave out GPL 
> licenses to 
> Asterisk.  Why, then, do they require that contributions are made any 
> differently?  Why do they require freedoms with contribution 
> that they 
> did not give with theirs?  Well, probably because they believe that 
> they're owed that, and probably because many others in the 
> community not 
> unlike yourself agree with that opinion as well.

Asterisk doesn't "need" Digium.  Other folks could of filled the
hardware voids and produced better TDM cards and IAXys, and... And with
the source GPL'd, there's really no reason to ever give Digium anything.
However, by planning the dual-licensing model, Digium basically assured
that if anyone ever makes money on the software, it would be them.  I
think that's perfectly fair.

Keep in mind, Digium is not saying that all code changes have to be made
available to them royalty free.  They're bound by the GPL, which only
says that any changes you distributing have to include full source code.
All they're asking for is that any code that goes into CVS and thus
becames port of an Asterisk version needs to be disclaimed, so that it
can be reused in a commercially licensed version.  Nothing prevents you
or anyone else to fork off your own CVS server and keep it GPL'd (unless
I missed something somewhere).