Dear Treggers, I know this topic has come up before, but I'm not sure what answers were received. We have a client who wishes to develop equipment that can be connected to the proprietary extensions (feature phone extensions) of popular PABXs. Since it appears that the manufacturers do not publish (and indeed have no reason to publish) the interfaces between their PABXs and feature phones, this endeavor seems to involve reverse engineering. If a standard were available, this would be wonderful, but I believe the only one would be the ISDN interface which is used for connecting some feature phones, and even then, I assume that the specific meaning of the transmitted data remains unpublished.
We would not like to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, and I am sure that our client would be perfectly willing to pay PABX manufacturers or third parties who have already reverse-engineered popular feature phone interfaces, for the necessary information. I am asking this question in a manner that might sound frightfully naive to some. If anyone believes that there is a legal problem with reverse engineering such an interface, and then selling an add-on product that connects to the interface, please let me know. Our client is clearly not intending to break the law, and neither are we! We are aware of the limitations of reverse engineering, inasmuch as it is liable not to reveal the whole story - test functions may not be supported, and future upgrades may no longer work, etc.. Thank you in advance for any concrete suggestions and contacts, David Drori Novarex Technological Enterprises Ltd., POB 2833, Luz Building, 5 Kiryat Hamada Street, Har Hotsvim, Jerusalem 91028, Israel. Tel: +972 2 586 4546 Fax: +972 2 586 5890 Mobile: +972 50 678686 E-mail: [email protected]
