Hello Max,
On 06/17/05 15:42, Max Malloy wrote:
Dear Bogdan, Dear Daniel,
as a user of SER for a number of years I very much appreciate your work and effort to liberate SER from the clutches of iptelorg.com and its microsoft llike attitude. I am sure it was not easy for you to stand-up against those who have paid your salary for so long and given you the chance to collect the knowledgy and software upon which you have built your own company.
you are right about collecting knowledge, but, fwi, the work there was related to different research projects, and SER was more a side effect. If you can review the cvs logs, many contributions of us were made in our free time, many features in SER were never used in a project of the institute. Because we lived at that time paid by the institute, all the code (also the one made in our free time) is copyrighted by the institute.
I also agree with you that it is utterly rude of the Fraunhofer as the maintainer of the iptel.org site to make a reference to its start-up -the fact that Fraunhofer has invested so much (including your salaries I assume) does not give it the right to do so.
I do not agree with you, they have the right and can do what they want, they own the system. The issue was whether this is acceptable or not for the community.
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?
You have to contribute to get back something, this is how open source works. People work together for mutual benefits.
I would recommend to put these parts under the BSD license.
It is not possible, it is not compatible with GPL license. One would have to write a new ser from scratch to do so.
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.
The issue which generated this situation was related to free contributions. When someone wants to make something available for others, and users need it and it is something good, why to drop it.
So, let's analyze and interpret better the reality.
Regards, Daniel
My best regards
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Daniel-Constantin Mierla -
Max Malloy