Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
Paul wrote:
The question that raises is: How does a GPL fork differ enough to
lose those waivers? Suppose I write several thousand lines of GPL
patches to a GPL-released asterisk. I put the patch set and the
original asterisk tarball on my ftp/http servers. I don't see much
difference between that and a forked project as far as license issues
go.
There is a huge difference.
An original Asterisk distribution plus patches is still called
Asterisk, since it is the source code that was distributed by the
owner of the Asterisk trademark.
If you modify the code and distribute it, you cannot call it Asterisk,
since you are not the trademark owner. Once the name 'Asterisk' is not
applicable to the source code, the GPL exceptions that Digium has
granted do not apply, since they are granted to 'Asterisk', not to
'the collection of source files known as Asterisk'. It's legal
semantics, but it's very important legal semantics :-)
The debian way is to distribute the upstream source tarball and
patchset. From what you are saying a linux distro that only distributes
a tarball of the patched source would not be able to call the package
asterisk. That sounds acceptable to me. What about the ready-to-run
binary packages I got from debian? Those are called asterisk.
So if put copies of official asterisk source tarballs out along with
patch files that can be called asterisk. So what if I also offer
binaries for different distros. Seems to me I would get the same rights
that debian and fedora projects get.
My point is that it could be considered a fork but the means of
distribution allows it to be called a modified asterisk.
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