On Thursday 17 September 2009 10:01:46 Moises Silva wrote: > On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Gordon Henderson < > > gordon+aster...@drogon.net <gordon%2baster...@drogon.net>> wrote: > > On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Tilghman Lesher wrote: > > The "free" one or the Howlets one? > > > > However I can't see how the binary blobs of patented code which digium > > sells doesn't voilate the GPL either. > > Because Digium OWNS the Asterisk code, and they make an exception for their > binary code, is their right as owners (copyright holders) of the code.
Close enough. Digium doesn't own the Asterisk code, but it possesses enough of a copyright interest in the code, as well as licenses from all contributors, in order to be able to make that exception. There is a way for Howlertech to keep their G.729 licensing code under wraps, run against Asterisk, and comply with the GPL, but they haven't done it. They'd have to separate out the interface code from the codec code, develop a pipe interface (or shared memory interface, i.e. SYSVSHM) between the two, run their binary blob in a separate process, and distribute the source for their interface code to Asterisk, along with the binary blob, enough for someone to be able to compile the module themselves. -- Tilghman Lesher Digium, Inc. | Senior Software Developer twitter: Corydon76 | IRC: Corydon76-dig (Freenode) Check us out at: www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
