[asterisk-users] Re: Asterisk Faxing Support

[Lee Howard]

Craig Guy wrote:

> it wouldn't make business sense for Digium to have code in the free 
> distribution that can't be in their commercial distribution.


Yes, I do suspect that Digium sees things this way.

Maybe I'm too much of a free-thinker - too believing in the open-source 
philosophy, but I would like to think that this is not neccesarily 
true.  I would like to think that they could host and support a 
non-disclaimed GPL Asterisk - having features that ABE does not - and 
they would profit from that.  Still, they could ask for disclaimers, and 
undoubtedly many, many people here love Digium enough to do that even if 
they aren't required to do so in order to see their contribution 
integrated upstream.  In the cases where a contributor will not disclaim 
the contribution to Digium then Digium could make some attempt to obtain 
a license for ABE from the contributor (and I expect that this case 
would be extremely rare - but perhaps appropriate for cases like 
spandsp/rxfax/txfax), Digium could write their own rendition of the 
contribution, or ABE could just do without it.

The way I see it, if Asterisk improves or gets some new feature or 
increases its exposure then Digium (and every other business 
commercially involved with Asterisk) will benefit more from that than if 
the improvement had not taken place.

Certainly I think that it's fair to say that some contributions will not 
be disclaimed in the scenario I outlined that would have been disclaimed 
in the present scenario.  I think that depends on how well Digium does 
on keeping the Asterisk users loyal and willing to repay them in kind.  
However, in the end, even if they don't do a good job at that, I think 
that a better Asterisk means a happier Digium... even if that means that 
there is some differences between ABE and Asterisk GPL.

Lee.