[Asterisk-Users] Prices of g729 codec

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 14:57 -0700, Lee Howard wrote:
> As an example: Company X sells PCs with pirated copies of Windows that, 
> following proper and normal channels, they should have purchased from 
> Distributor Y.  Microsoft sues Company X and wins a court judgment 
> against Company X.
> 
> According to your interpretation Distributor Y was also *cheated* out of 
> money.  Yet, Distributor Y has no legal recourse to any monies from 
> Microsoft or Company X.  Why?  Because Distributor Y has no exclusivity 
> agreement with Microsoft guaranteeing it sole distribution rights to the 
> product.
> 
> I'm not trying to make a case to justify illegal activities.  However, I 
> don't think that a vendor has any claim to losses such as we're discussing.
> 

I was speaking not of a legal issue but of a moral one which is what
this thread has been about for a while.  People are saying that becuase
digium sells ABE as a commercial product, er I mean becuase they allow
GPL users to be their test bed for the software that people somehow are
obligated to pay digium.  In that context, and that was the specific
context to what I was replying, and if you are of a mind to believe that
beucase a company has given GPL code out means that you should buy
things from them then you are cheating digium out of money by not buying
their addons.

If however you want to take a legal argument, which it appears that you
want to change the context of the previous messages to be that, we can
now at this time change it, rather than trying to change it after the
fact to somehow prove a point.

In your example they said that they should have bought from distributor
Y if that statement were true then Y would have suffered loss and could
go after X.  If you did not mean to say they should have bought from Y
but instead they might have bought from Y then you are correct that Y
has no loss claim.  But I cant make that determination because I can
only go by what you did actually say instead of trying to make it up as
I go along.


In the case of the asterisk g.729 codec there are only 3 versions of it
afaik.  One is from digium (licensed and for sale), the Intel IPP stuff,
which is being distributed in binary form with intel code that isnt paid
for (they require money if you want to distribute) and with no license
from the G729 consortium, and another version which afaik isnt publicly
available.

Its easier for people to take the IPP stuff than to modify the codec
from digium (its really easy to disable the license stuff though) so
lets focus on that.  In that regard digium cant make an easy legal claim
since there is no legal requirement that all modules come from digium.
Infact to even attempt to ban commercial modules in asterisk would go
against the GPL (as per the FSF on asterisk modules specifically)
provided the rest of the gpl is upheld during their creation and
distribution.  Since that code doesnt come from digium, but instead
intel only intel and the g729 consortium would have a claim (intel
requires you to pay if you want to redistribute their IPP stuff).

So in the original context digium was cheated out of sales (cheated isnt
a legal term and not one I would use in a legal context anyway) however
in the new context that you brought up they werent.  

Its all about the context that words are said in, changing the context
after the fact doesnt change the validity of the original statements, it
just looks argumentative.



-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
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