[asterisk-dev] Bounty

[Kevin P. Fleming]

On 09/30/2011 10:51 PM, CDR wrote:

> account. I also called Digium tech support and asked them to write me
> this patch, and they declined. I guess they don't like the color of my
> money.  So you know, Cisco Systems added, years ago, a line of

This is exactly the sort of attitude that causes people to stop wanting 
to work with you. You know darn well that the refusal to write a patch 
for you has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with 'the color of your 
money' or anything of the sort. Digium is no longer in the business of 
doing custom development and has been out of that business for a couple 
of years now; requests to get patches written are directed to our 
network of partners in the ecosystem (by our sales department... tech 
support has nothing to do with this either) so that the requester can 
find someone who will do the work.

> With Digium I am not so lucky. However, I think that they missed the
> opportunity to make some money off me, and that is hard to explain.
> The patch would have taken a few hours. They declined to do the job.
> Go figure. In my own company, if the client needs a change in the
> system, I have NEVER declined to do it, for a price.

If Digium did that every time someone offered to pay money for Asterisk 
patches, within a few months the entire Asterisk development process 
would grind to halt after becoming a 'pay to play' system. The price 
we'd have to charge you to justify redirecting our developers' time off 
of work that has a greater impact on Asterisk and its community of users 
would be so high that you'd just complain about how high our development 
prices are. We do, on occasion, develop additional features in Asterisk 
at the request of our OEM customers, when those features are in line 
with our goals for Asterisk and are generally applicable to the 
community: recent examples of this include the Connected Line support, 
significant increases in the support for BRI in chan_dahdi, and others. 
Those were multi-man-month efforts, and the cost to develop them was 
rather high, but the customers were willing to bear those costs in order 
to be able to utilize Asterisk in their applications.

There are dozens of people in the Asterisk community who do exactly the 
sort of work you are asking for, on a consulting/fee basis, and who have 
the skills and experience to do the work you are asking for. 
Unfortunately, over the past few years you have systematically destroyed 
any potential of those people being willing to work with you, and so 
when you post bounties like this, they don't respond.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming at digium.com | SIP: kpfleming at digium.com | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org