Inline
On 6/18/05, Max Malloy mcmalloy@walla.com wrote:
Are you planning to extend openSER with the VNT and the VPS products you have announced on your web site? As a user of SER and I guess a lot of other users as well have painfully been longing to a billing engine that can just do these things your products are promising. A better support for NAT traversal would also be nice.
Let's not mix the things. It is about free contributions. It does not mean I will make everything I own public. Would you give me your car? There are stand alone applications, different software or products, and I do not think everybody is going to give their products for free even they support open source or openser, in particular. Dont expect that you will have a nice live just supporting openser so everybody will give you what you will need. Would you share the earnings of using this software with the others?
I do not understand this now. so you are compalining that iptelorg provides closed source components to help it receive some revenue and fund its people who are working on SER. On the other hand you find it strange to ask you about your stuff.
Yes, you don't understand. Opensource does not mean you have to release everything you do to the public. Only in the case you sell it, then you release the sourcode. And yes, it is perfectly normal to have a double personality: release something, keep the reset private. Why? as a company you want to keep an edge on the competition.
What is/was/has_never_been (depends on who talks) in SER and iptel? That the commercial interest acted (or not) as a break to the public part. Are there more things behind the fork? no doubt ... power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Our company would like to build an NGN product that would benefit greatly from your components. iptelorg has insisted on us paying money for any source code they produce -it seems they still did not realize that they do not own SER -SER and all its extensions belong to the users and the community.
You are not right at all, you own your code and extensions, not others. As you can see, every file has a copyright holder which own the code. He can do what ever he wants to do, you can do also (take and modify), but do not expect that iptelorg or somebody else to do for you something for free when you require.
So if they are right in their business model I am not sure why you are making such a big fuss. It seems that you have the same attitude to open source as iptelorg (it is only good as long as it serves your own needs). For me it looks like this new fork is just a strategy to grab the control on SER. And even worse, I am afraid that if your company becomes more successful you will act just as iptelorg and will turn your back on the SER users and the SER community. With this background, to be honest, I would prefer the current situation and the control of iptelorg (at least we know how they work) than shifting my confidence to a new group that is just as commercial.
You can put this to the test. Build a freely availabe, public version of some of voice-systems private code. Then, ask openser community to be commited to CVS and so on. Note the answer you receive. I would also like to see it, it can be revealing. In iptel - ser, this case was TLS code.