[asterisk-biz] [asterisk-users] g729 capacity

Trixter aka Bret McDanel trixter at 0xdecafbad.com
Wed Sep 24 23:28:41 CDT 2008


On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 23:08 -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:
> You urge and help Bret with his terribly intelligent G729 license
> sharing, clearing house plan.  I think he should register a domain
> name and have a PayPal Donation link.  I would certainly donate for
> the development and even share a few licenses.
> 
> Not sure of the legal ramifications but the idea could cause a
> revolution in licensing in general, not just G729.

Why thank you, and the legal part seems to be fine with a "license pool"
where people share the unused licencenses during off peak time and
borrow others during peak times from people around the globe.  This
means you would actually get a total number of licenses that exceeds
what you paid for.  It also means if you have X licenses they could be
shared across all your boxes instead of um not.  1/3 of the globe should
be in "off peak" any any given time, while 1/3 is in peak time, and the
other somewhere in the middle.  That however wont fix the problem that
was being described.  Its not that different from the way sun used to
license their compiler (flexlm), and specifically that is where I got
the idea from so its not like it was original, although I did expand it
from just a local network license server to linking those servers to
allow sharing of licenses around the world. :P


The reality though for licensing is that the codec should be pulled on
that call and not offered if you have exceeded your license.  A "is
codec available" call should be performed for every codec (who knows
maybe they are running on a dsp which is filled even if its "free")
prior to sending the SDP.

It gets trickier though.  If you offer G.729 in the SDP - at any point
during the call that codec can be used.  So they may start out using XYZ
but they can switch at a later time at will, so if you offer it you have
to ensure that its available for the call duration, or reinvite to scrub
that from the available codec list.

AFAIK asterisk does neither of these things (nor do some other switches
I am aware of).  It would not take that much effort to add this either,
although I could add it to the real digium codecs (via trickery) it
would be best if this were from digium, simply because adding a feature
to ensure that you dont get dead air would force me to rename the
project, filter out all occurances of asterisk, digium, dundi and iax
under the trademark TOS, further since G.729 is not GPL compatible I
wouldnt be able to ship a system to anyone with G.729 installed unless
it was the business edition.  


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you!




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