[asterisk-dev] Asterisk Appliance?

[Rich Adamson]

Khelik Mikhail wrote:
>> We do not design 'GPL' hardware, nor did we use any of David Rowe's 
>> work in designing our hardware. The appliance uses our existing 1- and 
>> 4-port analog modules, has an onboard Ethernet VLAN switch, onboard 
>> hardware echo cancellation, and will actually be a shipping, tested, 
>> EMI certified product :-)
> 
> I guess actually these projects conceptually and architecturally
> similar. The main differences are in brand, price and approach :).
> 
>> If others want to produce a comparable piece of hardware (although I 
>> fail to see how the GPL applies to a piece of hardware) and make its 
>> design available for free they are certainly welcome to do so.
> 
> In this case it would be great if Digium officially open the
> architecture of this platform, it's not necessary to open the hardware
> itself.

If you read between the lines, it is an open architecture. It happens to 
be the "business edition" and happens to use a processor different from 
the standard PC. Presumably access to the box is limited (via 
passwords), however a cross compiler is shipped with the dev kit to 
allow you to write applications for it.

If you had to support such a box (in very large numbers), you'd want 
something that is supportable and stable, and that's what I read into 
the documentation.