[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Kevin Walsh wrote:

> 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
> upon existing Asterisk code, "the owner" would have the automatic right
> to take any code they wanted and backport it into the Asterisk Binary
> Edition - as long as the contributor to the fork had previously signed
> a perpetual "disclaimer" at some point in the past.

Nice work clipping out only the words you wanted to use there! Let's try 
this again, with the actual text from the disclaimer:

(b) The rights made in Para. 1(a) of this Agreement applies to all past
and future contributions of Contributer that constitute changes and
enhancements to the Program.

2.  Contributer shall report to Owner all changes and/or enhancements to
the Program which are covered by this Agreement, and (to the extent known
to Contributer) any outstanding rights, or claims of rights, of any
person, that might be adverse to the rights of Contributer or Owner.

In other words, the _only_ code that the disclaimer covers is that which 
the Contributer directly identifies to Digium to be covered by the 
disclaimer. In absolutely no way does this disclaimer give Digium the 
right to appropriate other changes the Contributer makes to the covered 
programs without their knowledge and permission.

In addition, even the most liberal interpretation of these clauses still 
includes the words "Contributer" and "contribution", which clearly means 
that the entity signing the disclaimer has sole discretion which of 
their changes are covered and which are not.