Lee Howard wrote: > > Yes, I do suspect that Digium sees things this way. > > Maybe I'm too much of a free-thinker - too believing in the open-source > philosophy, but I would like to think that this is not neccesarily > true. I would like to think that they could host and support a > non-disclaimed GPL Asterisk - having features that ABE does not - and > they would profit from that. Still, they could ask for disclaimers, and > undoubtedly many, many people here love Digium enough to do that even if > they aren't required to do so in order to see their contribution > integrated upstream. In the cases where a contributor will not disclaim > the contribution to Digium then Digium could make some attempt to obtain > a license for ABE from the contributor (and I expect that this case > would be extremely rare - but perhaps appropriate for cases like > spandsp/rxfax/txfax), Digium could write their own rendition of the > contribution, or ABE could just do without it. > > The way I see it, if Asterisk improves or gets some new feature or > increases its exposure then Digium (and every other business > commercially involved with Asterisk) will benefit more from that than if > the improvement had not taken place. > > Certainly I think that it's fair to say that some contributions will not > be disclaimed in the scenario I outlined that would have been disclaimed > in the present scenario. I think that depends on how well Digium does > on keeping the Asterisk users loyal and willing to repay them in kind. > However, in the end, even if they don't do a good job at that, I think > that a better Asterisk means a happier Digium... even if that means that > there is some differences between ABE and Asterisk GPL. >
I couldn't agree more with this. I also think that they could charge the same amount for commercial support (and not the actual product) of Asterisk with a certain feature set (i.e., similar to ABE today) and make just as much money, if not more, than now. This whole concept being similar to RedHat. I may be mistaken, but I don't think they have dual licenses. I was under the impression that RedHat sold support for RedHat Linux, not the actual product. Then again, what do I know? There's no MBA diploma hanging on my wall. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
