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

[Chris Miller]

On 4/1/2010 1:52 PM, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> 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).


Understood, I figured it was something like that. Do you have some 
mechanism in the source install that causes similar enforcement 
behavior?


> 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.


A method of providing the GPL license conflict information at 
install time, or the reason for (and resolution of) the RPM install 
conflict?

It seems to me that the GPL information could be displayed in the 
"register" binary since no end user can use a Digium supplied 
commercial module without registration, right? It could also be 
displayed on the Digium website where end users have to purchase 
their Digium licenses.

This begs the question of when the actual violation occurs. In other 
words, is this really a "usage" issue, or does the violation occur 
at install time even though the non-GPL component is not "usable"?

It sounds to me that many users are violating the GPL by installing 
the non-GPL modules. Rather than simply making it difficult to 
install, why not be proactive in encouraging compliance by detailing 
the steps openly. When I Googled for this issue, I turned up no 
useful information. Seems like a page explaining the above somewhere 
on the Asterisk and/or Digium site would be helpful.

The only workaround at this point is to force install the RPMs. This 
encourages lesser skilled sysadmins to use this practice regularly 
(on all Linux dependency issues) without fully understanding what 
they are doing. I took the time to download the SRPM and saw this 
was an arbitrary dependency, but most sysadmins won't burn the time. 
What also concerned me was a few posts about a system stability 
issue with the SkypeForAsterisk module after force installing the 
RPM. This contributed to my being uneasy about proceeding with this 
route without full knowledge of the situation.

Alternatively I need to maintain my own version of 
asterisk-addons-core without the gplonly provide. Kinda defeats the 
purpose of using a third party repository for convenience.

I understand the reasons why this was done, but unless I've 
overlooked some resource on the interwebs, it looks like the other 
shoe never dropped and zero documentation was provided to work with 
this issue. I can't think of a clean way off the top of my head to 
address this in RPM, so I'd argue that RPM is simply not the 
appropriate choke point to enforce compliance. Feel free to send me 
a PM if you want to discuss further.

Regards,
	Chris

Chris Miller
President - Rocket Scientist
ScratchSpace Inc.
(831) 621-7928
http://www.scratchspace.com