[asterisk-users] licence quick question

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 12:30:47PM +0100, Anselm Martin Hoffmeister wrote:
> 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

Unless it is based on GPLed dialplan, of course. The same applies to all
the others. E.g: I figure that the sample dialplan that is distributed
with Asterisk is distributed under the same license as Asterisk itself.

> - 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

or use #exec and your own top secret obfuscated binary.

For the client to figure out from 'show dialplan' (if they have root
access to the system or access to the manager interface).

> - 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)

AGIs are not linked with Asterisk. This has been explicitly clarified.

Same goes for the AMI.

> 
> 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.

Right.

> 
> 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.

Right. Forgetting such basics is a silly reason for many of the GPL
license violations that shouldn't have happened in the first place.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen       
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