Asterisk, Digium, GPLV3 and New Secret Appliance AA250
Internetnews.com has learned that Digium has a new but unannounced appliance in the works. It's reporter spied the appliance -- a 1U rack-mounted unit with the name AA250 -- in Digium's booth at the NXTcomm show in Chicago.
Asterisk founder Mark Spencer confirmed the new machine with internetnews.com in a recent phone call and said that Digium was at the show for "meetings." Spencer declined to elaborate on who he was meeting with, but the new appliance will bring Asterisk firmly into the enterprise space. Asterisk's current machines, which run the group's Asterisk application, max out at 50 users and target the hobbyist or small-office VoIP PBX market. "It's an upgrade of the smaller appliance to handle more users, targeting 250 to 500 users and it should be out in the next couple of quarters," Spencer said reluctantly, declining to elaborate.
The new appliance is also being cooked at a time when Asterisk, which is licensed under the GPL version 2 (define), is grasping with the decision of whether or not it should migrate to the GPL version 3 slated for release this week. Asterisk must consider the new license and whether or not it would help or hinder its march further into the enterprise and possibly even carrier markets.
"The patent stuff is the most confusing part of the license now and the part that gives me the most pause on the GPL v3 because it's not really very clear to me how this situation affects a company like Digium when you're sitting in a patent minefield," Spencer explained.
"In v3, it actually grants a patent license in the GPL so you're stuck with the license the GPL has selected for the patent. That may concern some people who are interested in contributing to Asterisk."
In a nutshell, there are some items that Spencer feels he needs to understand more about before he makes a decision on moving to v3 or not.
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