[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Lee Howard wrote:

> Go ahead and have a proprietary fork, sell it, have it specially 
> licensed.  But please, please, please treat the community fairly.  
> Otherwise it causes unrest in the community, discourages contribution, 
> encourages forking, and triggers forum threads like this one.

You seem to be neglecting the amount of work that Digium puts into the 
Asterisk (and related) products on an ongoing basis that is given to the 
community at no charge. Saying "Digium GPLed Asterisk and we're thankful 
for that, now what" only makes sense if it happened one time and then 
Digium stopped contributing to the source base.

I think the situation is much different from that (although I'm 
obviously biased since I'm paid to work full-time on Asterisk by 
Digium). Digium continues to pay people to provide enhancements to 
Asterisk, Zaptel and the related projects, and those enhancements are 
even used by companies that directly compete with Digium. We also very 
strongly push our "custom development" customers in the direction of 
letting us include the code we write for them into the open-source tree, 
so that the community will benefit.

In other words, I think the contributions from Digium to the community 
are ongoing, and in many ways more than offset the license that 
contributors grant to us for the commercial use of their code in our 
products. Your opinion may vary, of course :-)