[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Adam Goryachev]

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 04:15 +0100, Kevin Walsh wrote:
> It has been flippantly said, a number of times, that "if you don't
> like the situation then you can fork the project."  A major fork seems
> (to me) to be pointless for one main reason (and a couple of lesser
> reasons):
> 
> As I see it, anyone working on an Asterisk fork who had previously
> signed the dangerous "disclaimer" (the perpetual one) could find their
> changes to the fork rolled back into the Asterisk Binary Edition
> without any further permission being required.
> 
> The perpetual agreement grants "the owner" a "non-cancellable right
> to use changes and/or enhancements" made to the Asterisk codebase "as
> [the] owner sees fit."  As any Asterisk fork would, of course, be based

IANAL, but I assume you also have the right to revoke the agreement as
relating to future patches. ie, it is non-cancellable in that I can't
contribute something today, and next week change my mind. I am sure I
can sign the agreement, contribute enhancements, cancel my agreement,
and no longer contribute enhancements.

> A fork wouldn't get very far without the support of at least some of
> the regular contributors [snip]

Absolutely, since there is no point in a fork if nothing changes in the
code base.

> For this reason, I believe that if a fork were
> ever necessary, it would struggle to beat a distinct path away from
> the Asterisk Binary Edition

Correct, until the point where there is MORE features being added to the
forked version of asterisk than the digium version of asterisk. This
isn't likely to happen while digium themselves are making a significant
contribution to asterisk source code, AND, the *average* feeling of the
community is that they are happy with the status quo. Sure, nothing
changes if nothing is discussed, however, it would seem that you are a
member of a small minority group. So, a fork probably wouldn't work.

Regards,
Adam