[Asterisk-Dev] 3rd party call control / CSTA , JTAPI orTAPIinterfaces

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004, Schaefer, Mark wrote:

> Okay, I give up.  It seems the "new" thing for startup companies is to
> burn bridges with potential customers.  I thought that a smart bunch of
> developers would be interested in gleaning real-world requirements, but
> I guess it's more important to be right than employed.
You do not understand how the free software world works. 

95% of people who hack on Asterisk are not employed by Digium. When you
are talking to the developers, sure, we are interested in "real world"  
requirements, *but* we are mainly hacking on asterisk to satisfy *our*
(and our boss', if any) needs, not yours. Sometimes, your "real world"  
requirements align with our requirements, in which case, you might get
something from the asterisk hackers for free. More often, your
requirements have something to do with specifics of your industry (in your
case, requirement to interface with Gemstar) - in which case, nobody is
really interested in doing free work for you.

Things change when money enters picture - if you want feature $foo, you 
can post bounty on it (or pay Digium for it), and you will have it. 

If you think that magic words 'real world requirements' will suddenly make 
asterisk developers jump up and go 'WOW THIS IS AMAZING LETS IMPLEMENT IT 
RIGHT NOW' - you are wrong.


> BTW: I did develop part of the NSF handling code.  Small work, but I had
> to do it on my personal time because of company IP rules.
What's NSF? Have you submitted patches?

I'll emphasize that I'm *not* talking for Digium - I couldn't, I don't
work for them :) If you want to get a real impression about Digium -
contact Digium sales, not asterisk-dev.

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