[asterisk-users] Is Asterisk really good?? (added, What is ViciDial??)

[Matt Florell]

On 4/14/08, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 01:54:22PM -0400, Matt Florell wrote:
>  > With VICIDIAL you can do inbound/outbound/blended call handling and
>  > there are all sorts of features for call handling and agent functions.
>  > The latest VICIDIAL release is GPLv2, but for future major releases we
>  > are moving to the AGPLv2. VICIDIAL is free as in cost and speech.
>
> I noticed you had gone Affero.  Could you expand on that decision, if
>  you have a moment?  What's the difference between the two licenses, did
>  you consider GPLv3, and what's your situation on contributed code?

We finally decided we would be going to AGPLv2 for our next major
release due to a few hosted service providers out there that were
altering the code to VICIDIAL, offering "VICIDIAL hosted" and not
contributing their changes back to the project. And under the GPL they
have every right to do this as long as the code is not installed on a
client-owned machine or transferred to a client. This is known as the
GPL-ASP-loophole. AGPL just closes that loophole and says that any
customer of a hosted service like that has the right to the source
code too.

We have not done enough research on GPLv3 yet to want to move to it,
and a lot of other GPLv2 projects are staying put as well for the time
being.

As for contributed code, we require a statement of "this is my code
and the project can use it and redistribute it" from the author.
Nothing very detailed at the moment because there are not many code
contributors and the project is entirely GPL-based and is not
dual-licensed.


MATT---