[asterisk-users] asterisk-gplonly dependency in asterisk-addons RPM

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Chris Miller wrote:

> A comment in the spec file would have been nice... Does anyone know 
> if this a real technical issue, or simply a licensing conflict 
> between GPL and Digium?

It is not a technical issue; it is an issue because some of the modules
in -addons have licenses that are pure GPLv2 only, and in addition the
license for MySQL-based components restricts their usage to *only*
GPLv2-licensed applications unless a commercial license for MySQL is
obtained. Since loading one of Digium's binary modules into an Asterisk
process changes it to no longer be pure GPLv2, such usage restrictions
should be taken into account.

The purpose of that conflict is to ensure that the person installing the
packages is made aware of the issue and that they must take explicit
action to override it (thus ensuring that we don't facilitate accidental
violation of third-party license agreements).

If you can suggest a method to provide this information to people in
some automatic way when they are made aware of the conflict by RPM, feel
free to do so and we'll try to get it incorporated into the RPMs themselves.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
skype: kpfleming | jabber: kfleming at digium.com
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org