On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 08:57:47AM +0100, Lefteris Zafiris wrote: > On Thu, 29 Sep 2016, at 18:10, George Joseph wrote: > > The lawyers made us. ;-) > > In order to lessen the risk of future legal action, the codec reports > > anonymous stats to Digium once per day that contain the maximum > > number of simultaneous opus channels in the past 24 hours. Again, > > totally anonymous. We don't even record ip addresss, just a uuid and > > count. To protect that mechanism we had to do a binary distribution. > > By a quick look at the codec_opus.so file we see that the function > license_count_send() uses libcurl to make a POST request to > 'https://stats.asterisk.org/license' with the following headers/data: > > Content-Type: application/json > { "namespace": "codec_opus", "uuid": "%s", "high_water_mark": %d } > > For those who feel uneasy about sending usage data to remote servers > the readme > http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/codec_opus/asterisk-14.0/x86-64/README > states that 'If the module fails to send usage statistics, it will > NOT affect > the operation of the Opus codec' > So disabling this can be simply done by
[snip explaining how to disable it] No. Please don't go that way. If you respect Digium's claim that a patent license is needed, what you do here is a violation of in (in a transitive manner). If you don't, why bother using their phoning-home codec? We use free software. We use quality software that does what it is suppose to do. Software that we can change when needed. That we can rebuild for other platforms (and odd build flags) when needed. (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I happen to know a bit about copyrights and patents. Some of it may actually be correct. I'm a programmer who does not deal with the business side of things. I'm also employed by a certain company, as my email clearly states. That say, I do clearly care about Asterisk specifically and Free Software in general) There are generally no copyright issues with the Opus codec. The issue cited is claims of some unknown patents that are infridged by implementing an Opus codec. The developers of the codec state in the page about the license of the codec[1] that this does not seem to be the case. Furthermore, several big companies with pockets big enough to be sued (see names mentioned there) are likewise confident enough in using it. Opus is to become the new standard audio codec. It was designed from grounds up not only to be a good codec, but also a codec that is not under the control of any specific entity (or even a group such as MPEG-LA). I appreciate Digium's position. But I disagree. The company I work for does not believe there are patent issues with codec_opus and we ship a version (based roughly on [2] and later [3] (Thanks to Sean Bright and to Alexander Traud for maintaining them). You can find our RPM packaging of Asterisk 11 and 13 with that patch (it does take a small bits of maintenance) in [4] (may hopefully change in the future if I switch to cgit). Beyond my ideals of supporting Free Software, I also believe that providing an Opus Codec provides a better product for my company. I encourge you all to provide Asterisk with the supperior Opus codec. If it's good enough for Mozilla and Google, it's good enough for me. Yes, I care about Asterisk. But if it comes to a proprietary software that calls home, then things don't work well. I personally don't look at Asterisk 14 for now, as it is not LTS. Has anybody updated the version of the patch for 14 and/or master? [1] https://www.opus-codec.org/license/ [2] https://github.com/seanbright/asterisk-opus [3] https://github.com/traud/asterisk-opus [4] http://git.xorcom.com/?p=rpm/asterisk.git -- Tzafrir Cohen icq#16849755 jabber:[email protected] +972-50-7952406 mailto:[email protected] http://www.xorcom.com -- _____________________________________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-dev mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-dev
