Giving and Taking
markster December 25th, 2007
First of all, I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas (well at least to those who celebrate it and/or appreciate the sentiment)! It’s a day when many people, myself included, put an especially significant thought into giving. What many people do during Christmas is give gifts (perhaps in recognition the gift that many Christians celebrate receiving 2000+ years ago).
In the early days of Asterisk, when I went to conferences and sat on stage with folks from Cisco and Avaya and other big telecom vendors, they tended to look at Digium like a charity, and Asterisk as purely a gift. However, it’s important to note that while in some sense, Asterisk is a gift, it is also a gift that has some special meaning and responsibilities associated with it (perhaps more like an engagement ring). In particular, Asterisk is licensed under GPL, which allows a wide variety of free use, but also requires that distribution be done in a similarly gift-like method.
Occasionally, however, I have heard people complain that the Digium GPL license is somehow not a real GPL license, since Digium also offers Asterisk under a commercial license.
This no more makes Asterisk “less GPL” than it makes a gift less valuable just because it’s given to someone else as well. There is nothing about dual licensing that in anyway takes away from what is given under GPL. Furthermore, if the concern is that people can create commercial derivative works without releasing the code of their changes, do those same people who complain also object to the GNU C Library which is released under LGPL? Do they also complain about the Apache web server, which is released under an even less restrictive license? X-Windows? Almost all of BSD? All these systems allow commercial exploitation. The dual licensing model that Digium has chosen introduces an explicit monetary cost to choosing the proprietary route, thus providing greater direct incentive to people to choose to open their changes, and further allowing people who do not choose to open their changes to subsidize the work that Digium does with Asterisk by allowing us to add more open source resources (think Green Energy Credits here). In fact, our staff of open source dedicated programmers has more than doubled in 2007 alone!
The only people with a real reason to be upset feel that way because they cannot choose the proprietary route without paying a fee. In other words, it gets in the way of their desire to make money through proprietary add-ons without having to share in the cost of development of the underlying technology.
I have so many things to be thankful for this Christmas, but among the top of the list is the gift of so many contributers and customers who allow me to continue to give through my work at Digium.
