[Asterisk-Users] Re: www.openpbx.org

[William Lloyd]

On 7-Oct-05, at 9:45 PM, Paul wrote:
>>
> The thing to remember is that the digium folks are not going to  
> spend months slaving over a new hardware product and then put the  
> device driver source under a closed license only. The gpl code can  
> be used in an asterisk fork like openpbx or in something written  
> from scratch like MyStinkingPBX as long as the license is honored.  
> That helps digium hardware sales.
>
> Dual licensing is not such a bad thing. Suppose I want to build a  
> proprietary black box product that uses the acme XYZ99 chipset. Do  
> you think the author of a good GPL'ed XYZ99 device driver would  
> refuse to consider a good legal dual-license opportunity? I doubt it.
>
> Also consider that there are situations where 100% open source is  
> never allowed. Check out visa/mastercard processor certification  
> for a good example. Digium dual licensing availability means I  
> could actually stand a chance of using asterisk as the basis for  
> systems used by military and law enforcement in applications that  
> require extremely high security.
>

One problem with the dual license is only Digium employee's can check  
code into the main code base.  Lawyers could be all over product like  
ABE if they were not vigilant on people signing the license document.

In the end this does hamper third party hardware support (ie device  
drivers) being integrated into the main Asterisk code tree.  To do  
this would require the new hardware manufacturer not only to release  
their driver under GPL, but to also give the code away to Digium.   
Something many of them may be unwilling to do.

The other option is for the new hardware company to purchase some  
other type of Asterisk license from Digium.

The question is: Long term is Digium a hardware or a software company?

Law enforcement and many high security systems use open source in  
many cases.  Look at the security products built from OpenBSD for  
example.  It's the security vs obscurity debate.

-bill
wlloyd at slap.net