[Asterisk-Dev] Learn some respect. was Re: benevolent dictatorship, or inclusive developer community?

[James Sharp]

> Hello,
>
> As glad as I am to see some commentary on the status of the project and
> suggestions for the future administration of the code, I am also disgusted
> to see the level of ingratitude shown toward those responsible for getting
> the project this far.
>
> As of this moment, Asterisk is a production quality softswitch solution
> that
> many of us are more than willing to use for our own selfish commercial
> purposes.  Quite frankly, I'm not interested in rocking the
> Digium/Nufone/Brian West souffle' in a manner that will disrupt the
> relatively continuous flow of updates and support that I'm used to now.

Exactly.  There's lots o' bucks to be made in offering the world a VOIP
platform that doesn't cost $50,000 per box.

> However, I do think that the * project could benefit from an experienced
> IT
> Project Manager like myself (with over $30 million in successfully
> administered contracts) so I offer that skillset to the project.
>
> Similarly, this seems like an appropriate juncture for Digium to release a
> bare-bones, yet stable asterisk (a'la Fedora) and for Digium to focus on
> for-profit projects that add value or specialized vertical feature sets
> (i.e. doctors office/lawyers office telephony).

The question (or at least my question) is...would we want Digium to stay
as a hardware/software company, a mainly hardware company, or a mainly
software company once the next few products (FXO ports & 5V TE410 come to
mind) come out.  Personally, I'd like to see them shift more towards
hardware development so Asterisk can compete in more and more markets (T3
cards & the like).  There will come a time when Asterisk is going to be
just as bullet proof as a Big Dollar(tm) LEC-class switch.

> I could probably stir up a $10m initial round of funding for this purpose.
> This would preserve existing revenue streams (Keeping Jeremy in diapers
> and
> formula) while adding a project manager to create an open development
> environment for the plain-vanilla-stable version of Asterisk.

I hope you're not referring to JerJer...heh.