[Asterisk-Dev] Re: Asterisk Dialogic channel

[Gilmore, Gerry]

As probably the main instigator of this effort - at least from the Intel
side - I'd like to clarify some of the things discussed on this (and
other related) thread(s).

Firstly, I must say that I am not officially speaking for Intel, but -
again - since I was involved in all of the facets to this, I do know
some more of the answers. Also, for the record, I am a proud Penguinista
and FLOSS evangelist who has been using and advocating Linux since about
1996. I first encountered Asterisk several years ago and have been
following it since then.

Secondly, the ABE-only nature of the chan-dialogic driver is driven by
two interlocking things: Mark originally wrote it and owns the rights to
it; and the license of our System release software is not
GPL-compatible. Mark has publicly stated that if/when we (Intel) release
our SR software under a GPL-compatible license, that he would move the
driver into the main tree.

Just for the record, though, our SR license does not in and of itself
automagically preclude it's use in GPL projects. Bayonne and other
projects use our SR stack through loadable/linkable modules and the GPL
allows this, AFAIK.

>From a marketing and sales standpoint, most of our customers are
actually much more accustomed to - and comfortable with - the type of
regression-tested, super-supported (and fee-based :-) licensing that
comes with ABE.

>From the product side, our goal is to do 2 things with the channel
driver: support as many boards as possible, as well as our HMP software,
and enable as many of our "value-added" features as possible within the
Asterisk framework. I won't do a sales pitch here, so I'll fill in some
of those details later.

>From the tech side, we're looking at using the ability to know when a
call needs to be bridged to a "non-Dialogic" device to know when to use
dx_playiottdata() or use the dx_setuio() functionality with as small a
buffer size as possible. If it's purely native Dialogic, we can use the
former, otherwise, the latter. In order to support both methods, though,
we can't support the older "non-JCT" boards such as the old D/41 ISA
cards, etc. Basically, all of the JCT series of Springware cards, the
DM3 series (PCI and cPCI) and HMP software is the goal. It may all get
phased in, but we're trying to be aggressive (for us :-) at getting it
out.

I hope that this clarifies some things and I'll continue to monitor this
thread in case I may be able to answer any follow-up questions. 

Thanks,

Gerry

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary
and those who don't.
 
Gerry Gilmore
Field Applications Engineer
Intel Corporation
(http://www.intel.com)
 
-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Tony
Mountifield
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 5:34 PM
To: asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Dev] Re: Asterisk Dialogic channel

In article <BF584813.1344%brian at bkw.org>, Brian West <brian at bkw.org>
wrote:
> That would be a good way to do it and after I sent the email I thought
maybe
> they would but the release says ABE.  So I suspect that won't be the
case.

I suspect the issue is that the GPL won't permit the GPLed version of
Asterisk to be used with the proprietary chan_dialogic.so, or vice
versa.

I doubt that ABE will be any different to GPL Asterisk outside of that
dynamically linked channel driver.

BICBW :-)

Cheers
Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org
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