Are you saying that those of us that are using the product should not be allowed to voice our opinions about its licensing, development and maintenance? That we should all just shut up and take whatever Mark & co. give us? If that's the case, then this is most definitely NOT an open-source project at all.
Not at all. I believe you should voice whatever opinion you have, but you should bear in mind while doing so that Mark is under no obligation to even listen to you, and should not be. Those like Joe seem to be searching for some _legal_ way to do just that, which disgusts me because I know when they are successful it sets a legal precedent that could be used against _me_. As long as you aren't pursuing some legal angle whereby you can take over control of Asterisk, whether in part or in whole, then bitch away! That's what free speech is all about.
Let me try to make my point about property rights as clear as I can. The right to property means "the right to use and dispose of" the property. If someone is holding a gun to your head telling you what to do with it, it isn't _really_ yours, no matter how much lip service is paid to the fact that you're the one actually touching the property. If someone is forcing you (and I mean "force" in the truest sense, i.e. the laws of a government) to destroy your property or hand it over to someone else, then it is really the governments and they are just letting you pretend to own it. A good example of this is the current state of the ILECs in the US. What do you think would happen if SBC, Qwest etc. woke up tomorrow and blew up all their switches and said "well, they belonged to us, we paid excise taxes on them, we could do with them what we want." There would be a whole lot of board members in jail, for starters, for destroying the "public" telephone network.
Well, who does it belong to, the "public", or the phone company? It can't be both. Only one of them has the right to blow it up, and I'll give you one guess as to which.
Property rights are not a matter of degree. You cannot be "sort of" pregnant, you can't be "somewhat" dead, and you can't "kind of" own something, where others are partially in control of its use and disposal. It's either yours or it isn't.
Communism, ala the FSF and Stallman, don't work. Look at the history of communist states that have existed and those that are left and tell me that system works. I'd really love a good laugh. If you don't think the FSF is a communist establishment, go read the GNU Philosophy on the FSF web site. Everything is about making the "collective", the "public", or whatever else you want to call it, more important than the individual, and that is the basic principle upon which communism is built. Their idea is that noone has a right to his own ideas; that whatever you as developers may dream up ought to be the rightful property of the "public", and Stallman says so over and over and over. And where does that leave you, the developer, motivationally? Where does that leave you at the end of the month when its time to pay rent and buy groceries? It doesn't take rocket science to figure out why it doesn't and _cannot_ work.
The only rational way for men to deal with each other is through trading value for value, which is why I said the Asterisk licensing sets up a trade. You can use Asterisk not really for "free", but in exchange for what Mark can add to Asterisk along the way, rather than being compensated monetarily.
-- Tom
_______________________________________________ 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
