[asterisk-users] Re: Asterisk Faxing Support

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 06:12:03AM -0600, Lacy Moore wrote:
> Lee Howard wrote:

> > 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.
> > 
> 
> 
> I couldn't agree more with this.  I also think that they could charge
> the same amount for commercial support (and not the actual product) of
> Asterisk with a certain feature set (i.e., similar to ABE today) and
> make just as much money, if not more, than now.
> 
> This whole concept being similar to RedHat.  I may be mistaken, but I
> don't think they have dual licenses.  I was under the impression that
> RedHat sold support for RedHat Linux, not the actual product.

No. RedHat publish the full sources (as easily-rebuildable source
packages) to all the packages in RHEL. This is why CentOS is possible.

Digium may just as well *bundle* code of that sort in Asterisk (e.g: as
a separate AGI script, or whatever). The pproblem is that linking such a
code into Asterisk makes it (for the common interpertation of the
copyrights laws) a part of Asterisk.

So Digium cannot use exactly the same strategy as RedHat if it wants to
allow people to link propietary modules with Asterisk. And this is the
major difference.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen       
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