[guardian-dev] jitsi's parent company BlueJimp becoming part of Atlassian

Fri Jun 5 09:35:29 EDT 2015

What about Linphone? It seems a lot easier to use and setup, and is also
multi-platform.  I think if there was a standard way to provision a SIP client
using a URL, that would help a lot.

Since otr4j is free software, we can just fork and ignore BlueJimp's CLA, as
we have always done.  But it would be even better if all parties used a single
fork, and we're working on that now. (that's the core idea of starting the
otr4j/otrj4 repo)

.hc

Lee Azzarello:
> Heya,
> 
> I just picked up on this thread now, two months too late but I would
> like to chime in about my support of ostel.co. I continue to support
> the public service, which has 41K registered users and is going
> strong. As you may know, end user support is weak due to the project
> being a low priority for both GP and Series Digital, though the user
> base is active.
> 
> I've done a number of private deployments of the ostel stack. It's
> become a pretty standard procedure. My base rate is $3000 and it takes
> about two days. That said I haven't done any development on the
> backend stack in over a year. The primary reason is that the client
> application landscape, while abundant is a mess. Client support is
> also the more frequently asked question and it the most important area
> for user interest. Jitsi continues to be the most fully featured
> client as well as the most frequent request for user support. We at
> Series Digital have discussed developing Jitsi to have a more
> contemporary user experience, but the complexity of the code base as
> well as a growing desire for WebRTC support has pushed that project
> down on the priority list.
> 
> So to me this acquisition by a well know enterprise software company
> is a good sign for improved client support. Unfortunately it's a bad
> sign for freedom. I'm committed to supporting the backend stack as the
> world's only fully open source end-to-end secure SIP system. I'm
> interested to see where Atlassian takes the development of the WebRTC
> front end, especially regarding encryption.
> 
> That's my two sense. It seems the CLA is a very bad sign for freedom
> and I agree with Hans that moving away from otr4j in GP applications
> would be a good move.
> 
> Regards,
> Lee
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 12:19 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Tom Ritter:
>>> On 22 April 2015 at 08:41, Hans-Christoph Steiner
>>> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> This is sounding not so promising for the future of jitsi as free software.
>>>> Atlassian seems to have no free software projects of their own whatsoever, and
>>>> there page about "open source" is basically a sales pitch:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.atlassian.com/opensource
>>>>
>>>> more here, it looks like this is probably the Atlassian press release, more or
>>>> less:
>>>> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/21/atlassian-acquires-open-source-video-conferencing-company-bluejimp-to-power-hipchats-video-chat/
>>>>
>>>
>>> If they're going to use Jitsi's (open) source code in their closed
>>> source environment, and build on it without releasing the
>>> contributions (which is possible as they can relicense any additional
>>> developments to it) - it makes me wonder if past contributors to Jitsi
>>> can assert copyright over their contributions.  (I assume Jitsi wasn't
>>> requiring contributor agreements like some projects do to clear
>>> similar hurdles.)  I don't know much about this part of open source
>>> licensing though.
>>>
>>> -tom
>>
>> BlueJimp has required a CLA for contributions to their jitsi repositories:
>> http://bluejimp.com/bca.pdf
>>
>> With this clause:
>>
>> "you hereby assign to us joint ownership, and to the extent that such
>> assignment is or becomes invalid, ineffective or unenforceable, you hereby
>> grant to us a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge,
>> royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under those
>> copyrights. This includes, at our option, the right to sublicense these same
>> rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other
>> licensing arrangements; "
>>
>> Which seems to me to say that they can relicense any of the jitsi source code
>> as they please.  That's part of my objection to having otr4j governed by their
>> CLA:
>>
>> https://github.com/jitsi/otr4j/issues/15
>>
>> .hc
>>
>>
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