GPL infringment for sccp driver

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I was looking to use a color touchscreen phone with asterisk for the purpose of integration with home automation systems such as AMX and Crestron. After choosing the Cisco 7970, I found out that the state of the sccp driver most likely won’t cut it. I called a company that offers Asterisk system with the Cisco 7970 to see if we could do some business. One of the engineers said that they have the 7970 working with a proprietary driver. Since they are shipping systems with Asterisk and their proprietary driver, is this GPL infringement if they don’t make their driver source code available? I’d rather not say the name of the company untill I find out more.

Thanks,
Mark Stoddard

2

As long as they have not modified the core of Asterisk to acheive their driver and it is a seperate and distinct application that provides interfacing to Asterisk over a protocol (ie - SCCP) I do not believe this would be a GPL violation. Otherwise, following the logic that this would be a GPL violation, then a SIP enabled Cisco phone would need to opensource their drivers, etc, etc.