[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 10:56:42AM -0500, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> 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.

"Contribution" there does not mention the main Asterisk source tree.
Paragraph 1(a) defines "Program" as:

  the programs Asterisk, Gnophone, Phonecore, libiax

No reference is made regarding a specific source tree. 

But why is such an over-broad license needed in the first place?


Suppose a certain Kevin wrote a a patch to Asterisk that implements
chan_telapathy (a feature that was requested by his technical support
center). Kevin wants that code to be distributed with the main Asterisk
codebase so to reduce maintinance costs for that channel.

It is reasonable to assume that during that maitinance the code of that
channel will be changed. Maybe some of its code will be used in other
parts of Asterisk.

Kevin also sometimes finds a bug in parts of the Asterisk code that he
did not write. In that case he submits a patch.

Disclaimers aside, who has the copyrights in those cases?

Digium currently holds copyrights and/or is allowed to relicense the
full asterisk codebase as is currently distributed in the asterisk
tarballs on ftp.asterisk.org and also all the code in the asterisk CVS
on cvs.digium.org (any better definition?) . 

Assuming digium wishes to relicense that code (and that it is OK for 
Kevin), Kevin can permit Digium to relicense those two specific
contributions. So Kevin should have permitted Digium to relicense the
current versions he submitted.

If Kevin ever writes a new version of chan_telepathy and still wants it
included in Asterisk, he should simply permit Digium to relicense the
new code.

So:

a. There should be no reason for Digium to require anything about future
contributions.

b. The program should be well defined. A public CVS is a relatively
good definition, as it is easy for others to get and save snapshots of
it (not to mention that -cvs mailing list), and thus it can't be easily
changed in the future.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jbr.cohens.org.il | VIM is
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