[asterisk-users] Asterisk 3rd party developed commercial software sales licensing platform

[Tim Panton]

On 8 May 2008, at 09:36, randulo wrote:

> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 5:40 AM, Steve Totaro
> <stotaro at totarotechnologies.com> wrote:
>> Can this thread be moved to the biz list?  It really does not belong
>> here when words such as "the best way to monetize an application or
>
> The topic is still salient IMO, but again much posted here is  
> opinion :)
> The word license is often used. Sometimes a license is free, sometimes
> not. The topic wold also be of interest to developers but not
> appropriate for the devel list. I think with today's technology (email
> filters for example) there's room for some latitude on this list. A
> line can easily be drawn between "WE HAVE DIDs AVAILABLE" and a
> serious discussion of licensing of 3rd party software in the asterisk
> ecosystem.
>

Ok, I''ll bite. The question is:
Do we want asterisk to contain a licensing engine ?

Such an engine would need to :
	Hand out license tokens to proprietary modules linked to asterisk  
(like codecs etc)
	Hand out license tokens to proprietary systems connected to asterisk  
via manager (HUDs, etc)
	Hand out license tokens to proprietary endpoints talking to asterisk  
(softphones, media-gateways etc)

It is hard to imagine how such code could be implemented in a way that  
was compatible
with GPL. I guess it could be put into ABE, but that's Digium's call :-)

Past experience with license managers shows them to be the biggest  
drain on
support resources and the largest single failure cause. Avoid them if  
at all possible!

Tim.