[asterisk-users] licence quick question

[Anselm Martin Hoffmeister]

Am Montag, den 29.01.2007, 11:58 +0100 schrieb Thomas Winter:
> Hi,
> If I develope an dialplan, some AGI and AMI functions for Asterisk and ship it 
> as an complete product to an coustomer, do I have to put my developed code or 
> the complete product under the GPL?

IANAL, but in my understanding
- a dialplan is not "code", but a configuration file - that is not
affected by the GPL
- You will have to hand out the dialplan as a file on the Asterisk
server, else it is pretty useless - if your customer has shell access to
the * machine, he could just read that file
- AGI programs in script (perl,python,php,bash) will have to reside on
the * machine as well, accessible by users with shell access
- AGI binaries probably can be called separate programs in respect to
GPL - they will be called by *, but are not imminently necessary nor
binary-linked to Asterisk nor do they necessarily use asterisk libraries
(but you should check which libs you link into your program, especially
the licensing conditions for the asterisk-specific interface which might
have a special license)

In my understanding this means that as long as you do not change
anything in the asterisk codebase but restrict yourself to configuration
files and AGI programs, there is no need to disclose the code of those
to your customers.

They will very well have the right to obtain a copy of the Asterisk
source code as such, or the Linux kernel source. You probably should
tell them the machine runs GPL'ed code and hand them a copy of the GPL,
and if requested, refer them to download sources of the source code
used.

BR
Anselm