[asterisk-users] Digium and Asterisk

[Eric "ManxPower" Wieling]

Eric "ManxPower" Wieling wrote:
> Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>> On Monday 26 November 2007 11:14, shadowym wrote:
>>> On Monday, November 26, 2007 at 4:34 AM, Steven wrote:
>>>> I also believe that supporting asterisk via a Digium purchase is the more
>>>> "right" thing to do.
>>> How is buying Digium the “right” thing to do?  It is not like they are a
>>> ‘true’ open source company.  More like proprietary that likes to use the
>>> open source community to test.
>> I beg your pardon.  If you're not just trolling, I'd like to hear just how you
>> think Digium could be more of an open source company than they are now.
>> Digium gives away its flagship platform, Asterisk, for free (under the GPL).
>> I don't know how you could possibly get any more open source than that and
>> still stay in business.
> 
> I suspect the issue is, as always, the fact that 1) 3rd party GPL code 
> (like for example MySQL libraries, or any other GPL software) cannot be 
> added or linked to the Asterisk source tree and 2) all code added to the 
> Asterisk source tree must be disclaimed.
> 
> The ONLY reason for these two items is that Digium has a dual license a 
> GPL license and a closed source license.
> 
> Personally, I have no problem with this at all.  But some people seem to 
> think this makes Digium a closed source company.

Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to clarify something.  When you 
"disclaim" code sent to Digium you have a choice in how you disclaim it.

The first option is to just give Digium the copyright to your code. 
This is good for short or fairly obvious patches where you don't really 
care to keep the copyright to the code.

The second option, and the option that I choose, is to give Digium a 
royalty free LICENSE to use your code in anyway they see fit, but you 
keep the copyright.  This means that even though your code is in 
Asterisk, you are free to contribute that code to any project you want.