Jim Van Meggelen wrote: > I'm sure this is going to be a popular move: > > http://flatplanetphone.com/wordpress/?p=450 > > So the GPL says we can download > [the-open-source-pbx-that-I-am-not-licensed-to-say], and can sell it, but > our businesses can't talk about it without permission? > > This is going to get complex.
The issue quite simple really, GPL etc deals with copyright law, the word 'Asterisk' in the context of computers or more specifically computer based telephony (at least in the US and any other jurisdictions with cross border agreements in place) deals with trademark law. Google's actions are directly, or indirect due to past lawsuits they've lost and to head of future trademark abuse lawsuits like the ones parts of the Australian government announced it was planning to pursue. This is no different then Firefox, you are allowed to do what you want with the code, but you can't use Mozilla trademarks if you plan to make changes to the source code. Debian has a similar policy, the list of open source products with trademark restrictions is fairly long. To round off the list there is of course a third type of intellectual property, which would be patents, and this is what g729 is covered under. -- Best regards, Duane http://www.freeauth.org - Enterprise Two Factor Authentication http://www.nodedb.com - Think globally, network locally http://www.sydneywireless.com - Telecommunications Freedom http://e164.org - Because e164.arpa is a tax on VoIP "In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip." --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
