[Serusers] Official response of the iptel.org SER team

Official response of the iptel.org SER team to the mediaproxy vs. nathelper dispute. ================================================== Recently there has been a dispute between the author of the nathelper module, Maxim Sobolev, and Dan Pascu, who contributed mediaproxy module, over a possible copyright infringement. Our original intention was to let both parties to resolve the dispute internally, without any intervention of a third party. Unfortunately this attempt failed and the dispute was ventilated publicly on the mailing lists. Because situations like this hurt SIP Express Router project in general, we decided to review the problem by project members who are not connected to any of the mentioned modules. We hope that both parties will consider this statement objective. Our main motivation is to develop a state-of-the-art free SIP server. Unfortunately this goal cannot be reached with pending copyright issues. We carefully reviewed both, mediaproxy and nathelper modules. From the source code it is evident that mediaproxy module has been based on nathelper module. One example (but not the only one) is pingClients() function in mediaproxy. In accordance with Section 2 of the General Public License (GPL) the module shall be considered as a work based on nathelper module. The requirements of Section 2 apply to the module as a whole, because it has been published as a single piece of work, no matter of how much code derived from nathelper does the module contain. No parts of the module can be considered reasonably independent. The GPL allows to distribute modifications and/or work based on a program protected by the GPL under the terms of Section 1 of the license. Section 1 allows to distribute the work provided that appropriate copyright notice is displayed. mediaproxy is a work based on nathelper module, and nathelper module is protected by the following copyright: (c) 2003 Porta Software Ltd As a derived work mediaproxy module shall display this copyright in addition to copyright of other people or companies. It is a common practice in the SIP Express Router project (as well as in many other open source projects) to display the copyright notice at the beginning of the file. A copyright notice of the original file shall never be removed when forming a work based on that file. To satisfy the requirements described above, source files of mediaproxy module containing code derived from nathelper module should display the following copyright notice: Copyright (C) 2004 Dan Pascu Copyright (C) 2003 Porta Software Ltd As the maintainer of the official SER code tree and CVS we would like to ask the authors of mediaproxy module to display appropriate copyright notice. There are two possibilities to do this: - Split the mediaproxy.c file in a file containing the derived code, which will have also Porta's copyright, and a file containing only non-derived code which will have only Dan's copyright. Note that the file containing the derived code can have also Dan's copyright (he has copyright on the modifications). - Give Porta copyright to the whole mediaproxy.c file (if Dan wishes so). Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul <andrei(a)iptel.org> Jan Janak <jan(a)iptel.org> Jiri Kuthan <jiri(a)iptel.org> Daniel-Constantin Mierla <daniel(a)iptel.org> Bogdan-Andrei Iancu <bogdan(a)iptel.org>