Stefan de Konink wrote:
On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Joseph wrote:
How can proprietary protocol be open protocol?
If the protocol is fully documentated and this documententation is available to anyone you can speak of a open protocol. It is not an open 'standard', because it is only supported by Digium, thus proprietary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary
But, the protocol isn't "owned" by anyone, nor is it secret. Assuming that wikipedia's definition is definitive:
Something *proprietary* is something exclusively owned by someone
nobody "owns" the IAX2 protocol.
, often with connotations that it is exclusive and cannot be used by other parties without negotiations.
It may specifically mean that something is covered by one or more patents <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent>, as in /proprietary technology/. It can also mean that the copyright <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright> is used in a way that restricts the users' freedoms.
anyone can use the IAX2 protocol. I don't think it's possible to prohibit anyone from using a protocol, unless it's impossible to encode it without requiring patents. I don't think any patents (that digium owns, or that aren't stupid), cover IAX2.
And certainly, since the two main implementations are licensed GPL and LGPL, they're pretty open.
Of course, there is draft documentation that has just been released, but even if there wasn't, that wouldn't make it proprietary.. And the documentation has always been there, in chan_iax2.c, iax.c, iax-parser.c, iax2.h, etc -- it just has been in a language other than English.
-SteveK
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