>Is this really what the so-called "open" asterisk-makers Digium >should be doing? Is it only I, or is this just plain old monopolist >arrogance which should not combine with GPL? One thing that opensource advocates miss a lot of times is that while it's fine and dandy to take the high road with the lofty goals of RMS, in the meanwhile, the bills need to get paid and the product needs to be taken seriously by businesses other than other open-source fanatics. Sometimes, that involves exclusivity with a particular branch of the code, as Digium has done with ABE, or exclusivity with certain elements that make the product more attractive to prospective buyers, such as Allison-sounds. Imagine if someone (say, the OpenPBX guys) took all of their custom Allison-sounds (for example) and released them into the wild, if some form of copyright agreement could be brokered with her, that was better than those bundled with, say, ABE. Who, then, would buy ABE if they could just download these sounds, and get the same source from CVS? You have a better ABE than ABE, for free, and Digium is denied profit on their hard work. Things like this undermine the very reason to buy a product like ABE in the first place, and follow the progression: People don't buy ABE, don't buy Digium cards, etc etc and then one day, the doors are locked at Digium. The Asterisk code base will be forked a zillion times as everyone tries to "save" Asterisk, and in the end, it's a mess, and Cisco/Nortel/Avaya/Mitel/whomever wins. Open source / GPL gets a black eye because it would be a VERY public failure. You could argue that OpenPBX would emerge, in this case, as the natural successor, but the chances of them regaining the ground Digium lost are slim to none. Look at Novell: We run OpenXchange here, rather than the Novell version. There is no reason to buy the Novell version: the code base is exactly the same. It's my ass if the thing breaks regardless of which version we run, so why pay for it? The only difference between the two versions is the GUI, Novell's is prettier. But, you can download the GUI elements and integrate them yourself, which I have done, so Novell is denied my money because I downloaded and integrated a clone of OpenXchange that is, for all intents and purposes, the same. And Novell wonders why they have to lay off people.
This is the failing of the open-source business model: You have to offer something to differentiate your product from competitors, and, (this is essential) you cannot compete with yourself. Digium, AFAIC, is just trying to not compete with itself. Because open source companies are usually visionaries and really don't have a clue about the realities of paying the bills, they fail. Badly. The deck is stacked against open source companies, because to compete with closed source, they have to essentially give the product away. They loose credibility in the business world by giving the product away (ask my boss: it took me TWO YEARS of explaining for him to understand why Linux is free as in cost AND free/free) . Then, in order to gain some credibility and maybe make some bucks to pay everyone, they dual-license or go into exclusivity agreements and everyone in the community freaks out about how they are baby-eating Microsoft lovers and they are turning their backs on the community and fork the project partially out of spite. They can't win. Guys: They AREN'T TURNING YOUR BACKS ON YOU. They are just trying to make a few bucks to pay the bills, allright? Even the GPL 1.0.9 codebase has enough value in it to be worth tens of thousands of dollars per copy in the real world. You got that for nothing. Cut them some slack. As to the issue at hand, I, myself, have retained separate voice talent to re-record every Asterisk prompt, and Allison-sounds AND my own custom stuff. It sounds great, I own it, and it only cost me a grand. I did that 5 times for 5 separate companies. 5 grand total. That, my friends, is 1/3 the price of the full IVR solution from Mitel for a single instance, and Mitel's solution isn't even half as good as my own. Asterisk, the framework, made that possible. *THAT* is the real value. EVEN WHEN YOU PAY, ASTERISK IS IMO TWICE AS GOOD AS ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE. Why doesn't OpenPBX just cough up a grand to make their own sounds? Some may argue that Mark has a personal beef with the OpenPBX guys and he may be doing things that short-circuit competing efforts. He may well be. So what? We live in the real world, which is not some fantasy happy-happy place where everyone gets along 100%. This is how the dreaded B-word gets done. I'm going to zip up the flamesuit right now. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users