Lee Howard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Kevin P. Fleming wrote: > > You seem to be neglecting the amount of work that Digium puts into the > > Asterisk (and related) products on an ongoing basis that is given to > > the community at no charge. > > > So at least we agree, then, on what the reasoning is. Digium feels that > the community owes it to them. > I agree with that assessment.
It has been flippantly said, a number of times, that "if you don't like the situation then you can fork the project." A major fork seems (to me) to be pointless for one main reason (and a couple of lesser reasons): As I see it, anyone working on an Asterisk fork who had previously signed the dangerous "disclaimer" (the perpetual one) could find their changes to the fork rolled back into the Asterisk Binary Edition without any further permission being required. The perpetual agreement grants "the owner" a "non-cancellable right to use changes and/or enhancements" made to the Asterisk codebase "as [the] owner sees fit." As any Asterisk fork would, of course, be based upon existing Asterisk code, "the owner" would have the automatic right to take any code they wanted and backport it into the Asterisk Binary Edition - as long as the contributor to the fork had previously signed a perpetual "disclaimer" at some point in the past. A fork wouldn't get very far without the support of at least some of the regular contributors, all of whom have probably signed the perpetual agreement. For this reason, I believe that if a fork were ever necessary, it would struggle to beat a distinct path away from the Asterisk Binary Edition, which would be free to assimilate any advances into its own codebase. To mitigate the above, I believe that the perpetual disclaimer should be modified to cover only a specific time period (i.e. one year from the date of submission). All contributions made within that time period would be covered by the currently-valid agreement, and that agreement could be renewed annually, if desired. I don't see that sort of change happening anytime soon because I believe that the perpetual nature of the agreement is quite deliberate. I think people sign agreements out of convenience, or pressure, without reading carefully enough. For instance, I wonder how many people actually received their "$1.00 (One Dollar) and other good and valuable consideration" when they signed their future options away. -- _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ K e v i n W a l s h _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
