(For most of my readers who come here for general business topics, skip this blog. For the few that come here for Open Source or telephony information, you may find this open letter (verbatim below) I wrote to my employees last week interesting)

Yesterday, as I was making my way to the microwave, Nathan, in our bad ass support group, stopped me and asked me "why Fonality does not give back to the Asterisk community?"

This is old-school FUD created by Digium and its employees (and propagated to the media), but I was surprised to hear it coming from our own. "Give back to the community" always makes me chuckle at the power of propaganda.

Thus, I thought should quickly explain Fonality's stance on Open Source and Asterisk, since some of you are new. You are welcome to share what I write with anyone including our customers, our competitors, and the media. There is nothing secretive about our position now, in the past, nor hopefully in the future. In fact, I am proud of our position on this subject.

SHORT ANSWER

1. Digium forces any contributor to Asterisk to sign their commercial license, which gives them the perpetual right to sell your contribution back, in commercial binary form to anybody. This is not in the spirit of Open Source, so we won't sign. Thus, our changes do not get included in Asterisk. Many other contributors balk at this license which is why Asterisk has so many forks and offshoots (such as trixbox CE)
2. Every fonality customer gets full access to our Asterisk enhancements. We either put them in /usr/src directory (PBXtra) or available at: http://yum.trixbox.com/centos/4/fonality/SRPMS/ (trixbox Pro). We have always done this and will continue to.
3. We continue to maintain a fully free and 100% Open project in trixbox CE, which we give to the community under a 100% GPL. No commercial license funny games with trixbox CE.

LONGER ANSWER

As we all know, Digium is the original author of Asterisk. They also maintain the official source code tree, effectively acting as sole authority over *what* goes into the next version of Asterisk and *what does not*. Fonality and the general trixbox or Asterisk communities have no say in this matter.

This is not unusual. There are a number of OS projects that have a commercial company acting as the sluicegate for community contributions. But, here is where Digium gets sneaky. Before accepting any enhancement code from the community, they require said contributor to sign what they call a "Submission Agreement". This submission, while seemingly benign, is actually a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Among the most troublesome passages in this Agreement are this:

“You hereby grant Digium a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and transferable license to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute the Submissions, and to sublicense such rights to others.”

...and then this, which compounds the problem:

“The rights granted may be exercised in any form or format, and Digium may distribute and sublicense to others on any licensing terms, including without limitation: ...(b) binary, proprietary, or commercial licenses.”

(you can find the entire Submission Agreement here: http://bugs.digium.com/view_license_agreement.php)

To paraphrase, what this Submission Agreement states is: In order to have your enhancements accepted into Asterisk, you have to first agree to give Digium the right to perpetually sell your enhancements to any other company under a commercial, binary, or proprietary license.

So, what does that mean? This effectively means that Digium can sell your enhancements to another commercial company under a non-GPL license and that company is not bound to give enhancements back to you or the community. This means you do the work and they profit from it

Does that sound Open Source to you? I didn't think so.

So, I will *not* allow Fonality to sign this masqueraded commercial license. Instead, when we do improve Asterisk, we choose to give it back to the community *but* not Digium. This means that our code can be used by anyone, but can never be built into a commercial license and sold. PBXtra customers can find our source code in /usr/src and trixbox Pro customers (where we don't have enough room) are provided this link in their welcome email: http://yum.trixbox.com/centos/4/fonality/SRPMS/

On top of all of this, we maintain the trixbox CE project. This project is 100% GPL and therefore 100% Open Source. Contrast that to Digium, who maintains Asterisk under a dual-license (one GPL and one 100% commercial), you will see that Fonality's treatment of Asterisk is more in the spirit of true open source than even Digium! lol!

But, Chris, Digium wrote all of Asterisk and Fonality has benefited from it, so shouldn't we give back?
Digium did not write Asterisk for the betterment of mankind. They wrote it to fund their own for-profit hardware business. The more people that use Asterisk the more hardware they sell. Asterisk was, quite simply, a means-to-an-end for them. Digium is funded by Matrix Partners and Matrix is not there for altruistic purposes.

To summate, I don't get religious about this stuff. Open Source is a mechanism to provide standards-based software at a lower cost. It is not a holy war and there are very few prophets on the battlefield. Most of the really successful Open Source companies that you know and love (Apache being an exception) have a for-profit business behind them and a board room full of venture capitalists behind them demanding an ROI. Digium is no exception and neither is Fonality. The only difference is we sell software out of the front of the truck and they do it out of the back while pretending that companies like Fonality have done something wrong.

Which type of company would you rather work at?