On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 19:20 -0400, Steve Totaro wrote: > Then without running ABE, I can upsell all kinds of integration (even > things the customer never thought of) and be a true VAR, not just a > guy that sells a box.
Just be careful about calling it asterisk if you add or remove anything. See http://www.digium.com/en/company/view-policy.php?id=Trademark-Policy Genuine Digium Software is the software in the same form as originally distributed by Digium, without modification to the code of any extent. The only exception is that software may still be considered Genuine Digium Software if, in connection with distribution of that software for a certain platform, code has been removed that relates to functions that would not work on that platform in any event. Once a change has been made to the software, even if that change may be permissible under the GPL, the software is no longer Genuine Digium Software, because Digium did not make or control the change. Basically it means if you remove something for reasons other than porting or add anything for any reason you cant use their trademarked words (among others: DIGIUM, ASTERISK, AsteriskNOW, IAX, and DUNDi) anywhere in the software or your product description. It effectively forces a fork, which then gets you into problems with the disclaimers, given only for asterisk not your fork, for gpl incompatible software like openssl (and libterm or whatever the netbsd one is which is 4 clause BSD but I dont think has an official disclaimer). Not to mention replacing the few thousand times "those words" appear in the code. But hey so what if the gpl software is done in such a way as to effectively prohibit distribution of modified code, 3rd party modules, etc. the way they are doing it *is* within the license (trademark is different from copyright, which is what the gpl covers). You cant claim they are violating the wording of the license on this particular issue. Dont advertise it as asterisk or asterisk based per section "Uses that are Not Approved by this Policy" paragraph 3 in certain places of your web page (possibly not anywhere since that would influence search engine results if the engine indexes based on content). They claim a trademark on "iax" in that policy, but the US patent and trademark office pulled that, listing it as abandoned. http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=e2bcne.2.1 (iax) http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=e2bcne.2.3 (iax) http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=e2bcne.2.2 (pocket iax) USPTO didnt show a trademark for Dundi last I checked (a year ago maybe) so none was ever registered. They do at least use the correct tm symbol for this, to substantiate a "common law trademark". I didnt check for a common law trademark on iax though, but it shouldnt have a (r) it should be tm only if its there. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 516 687 5200 http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you! _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
