[Bug 177583] Review Request: zaptel-kmod

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Summary: Review Request: zaptel-kmod


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177583





------- Additional Comments From kpfleming at digium.com  2006-09-28 14:11 EST -------
I really don't know what else can be said. In spite of comments like 'dual
licensing is acceptable', I don't think the other commenters are willing to see
our position at all.

I know that you don't have a problem with including a dual-licensed component
into your distribution, and I also know that Linus et. al. don't have a problem
including dual-licensed code into the kernel tree. Those are not our concern.

What is our concern is that if Zaptel is merged into the main kernel tree, from
that point forward anyone who wants to improve it can do so without contributing
their changes to our version of Zaptel, which devalues our dual licensing of
Zaptel completely. Obviously, it is not in our best interests to do that. Today,
of course, people can easily produce their own distributions of Zaptel with
non-contributed changes (and those distributions exist), but since they are not
considered 'official' they are not the distributions that mainstream users will
want to use. If Zaptel is in the Linus kernel tree, that becomes the defacto
'official' distribution, and there would be no incentive at all for anyone to
contribute their changes to us for use in our commercially-licensed products.

I fully understand that the many members of the open source community do not
really care whether Digium continues to benefit from dual-licensing Zaptel or
not, and they are welcome to that opinion. In fact, if people want to take our
GPL distribution of Zaptel and submit it for inclusion into the kernel tree (and
continue maintenance of it from that point forward) then obviously they can do
that (barring any potential trademark infringement issues, which I am not in a
position to comment on).

I just don't see that Digium will ever decide that the best place for Zaptel to
live is in the kernel tree, and the primary driver of that decision is our
choice to keep it dual-licensed and desire for changes to be contributed back to
us. The additional benefits of having many more developers reviewing/fixing thec
code would most certainly be welcome, but they don't currently outweigh the
value of maintaining the ability to commercially license the relevant parts of
the code base.

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