[Asterisk-Users] Prices of g729 codec

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Sat, 2006-06-03 at 04:01 -0400, Chris Mason (Lists) wrote:
> I have no problem with paying Digium the $10 for G729 licenses, everyone 
> has to make money. It's the administration of the licenses that sucks. I 
> experiment with different hardware a lot, and make up demo machines to 
> install for customers with available hardware. I have to put G729 
> licenses on them, usually $100 each time, and when I install the real 
> hardware for the client, I can't transfer the licenses. If I scrap that 
> machine or change the interfaces, that's a $100 loss. I believe when you 
> buy a number of licenses, that should determine how many instances you 
> can use, regardless of how you want to deploy them.
> In short, the method of enforcement is poor and leads to resentment from 
> customers. Surely Digium can construct a better system?

well you could patch your system to allow mac addr changes, which is not
always a good thing since you may have the real mac address on a
different system, you could write a library that is loaded with
LD_PRELOAD or whatever that maps certain calls used by the codec to get
the mac address so it always returns what you want (systrace is an
example of remapping calls like this although that is likely overkill
for this example).  You could change the codec binary to bypass the
check, its only a couple bytes.  All of this lets you alter the
licensing model, I am not saying to do this to avoid getting licenses in
the first place (and in fact the first two methods require a valid
license at some point) but it lets you decide which system that license
runs on.  

I didnt see a EULA that forbids this, but then I didnt look either, so
you may want to be careful with that if you choose any of these methods.


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast IE +44 28 9099 6461    DE +49 801 777 555 3402
Utrecht NL +31 306 553058      US WA +1 360 207 0479
US NY +1 516 687 5200          FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.trxtel.com we pay you to terminate calls with us!
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20060603/dd9a214a/attachment.pgp