[hydra-dev] Still confused, but at a higher level

[Marc Blanchet]

As one who was invited and could not attend, I may write something that 
was discussed. sorry if it is the case. It would be very useful to get 
the top-down picture of the project, around the topics discussed in this 
thread, such as:

a) key features, that are not yet available in asterisk-trunk (a feature 
to me is "large": could be an internal feature such as capability to 
scale, not necessarily an external feature used by end-users).

b) differentiator with current market, first open-source: 
(asterisk-trunk, freeswitch, kamailio).

c) compatibility with asterisk? features? config? none? ...

I see the VoIP-PBX-B2BUA market matured a lot. It is not as when Mark 
created Asterisk 0.1... Therefore, the entry to market of a new thing 
must provide very useful and not available features.

maybe a 5 pager document describing these would be useful to all, before 
starting to do coding.

my 2 cents canadian.

Marc.

David Vossel a écrit :
> ----- "Terry Wilson" <twilson at digium.com> wrote:
> 
>>> The moment we start discussing channel drivers for Hydra, it has
>> become
>>> Asterisk 2.0 and we can't convince anyone that it's something else.
>>>
>>> If scalability is the keyword - define "scalability". And define
>> target market.
>>
>>
>> There is no way we could ever release a rewritten from scratch
>> Asterisk 2.0. To truly be Asterisk 2.0, the product would need to be
>> able to recreate all of the features that are in Asterisk 1.x. How
>> could anyone reach feature parity with 8 years of Asterisk 1.x feature
>> development into a year of development for an "Asterisk 2.0" that is
>> written from scratch? It just can't be done. If Digium called it
>> Asterisk 2.0, people would expect that it could handle everything
>> Asterisk 1.x could handle, and then some. Hence, Hydra is not Asterisk
>> 2.0. There is just no way we could *replace* Asterisk with the initial
>> release. Also, some features that we have now may never make it into a
>> Hydra release since they would be more effectively handled by an
>> external application that communicates with Hydra (I'm looking at you,
>> calendaring!)
>>
>> In 5-10 years time will Hydra replace Asterisk for most users? My
>> personal opinion (i am ABSOLUTELY not speaking for Digium on this) is
>> that of course it will--as long as it runs fairly efficiently on a
>> single box. The stability of the API and ease of making 3rd party
>> modules should be extremely attractive to outside developers and I
>> would expect that they would prefer working on Hydra than trying to
>> continue to hack through the Asterisk 1.x code. But, being both a
>> commercial and open source company I don't see how Digium could wait
>> until Hydra reached feature parity with Asterisk 1.x before releasing
>> it. It isn't like Microsoft released Windows NT and said, "we'll get
>> to printing support later". They had the option to do all development
>> in house and releasing it when it could do everything that Windows 3.x
>> could do. Digium doesn't have 50 people to throw at the problem, as
>> they rely also on us (still speaking in my community member role) to
>> contribute to the development proc
>>  ess. Outside development is one reason why Asterisk is such an
>> amazing piece of software. But, the downside is it is notoriously
>> difficult to make long-term projections about where things will be. If
>> we design Hydra correctly, I imagine other developers will see the
>> parts that aren't there (like voicemail) and decide that they would
>> rather not have to run Asterisk just for voicemail and will contribute
>> a voicemail module. But why would Digium invest time and resources
>> into replacing something that already works well with Asterisk?
>>
>> So, in my opinion, discussing whether or not Hydra will replace
>> Asterisk isn't really a worthwhile discussion topic. It certainly
>> won't lead to anything particularly helpful, code-wise. The community
>> will decide if Hydra ever replaces Asterisk by contributing missing
>> pieces that Digium doesn't have the time or manpower to replace. The
>> only way Asterisk would ever be replaced by Hydra is if people stopped
>> using Asterisk because Hydra did everything they wanted. I can't
>> imagine how long that would really take--if it ever happened. More
>> helpful, I think, is coming up with what we would like Hydra to do
>> before its unveiling--things that highlight what it can do that
>> Asterisk can't do well.
>>
>> Of course, I could be wrong. :-p
>>
>> Terry
> 
> Well written Terry, I completely agree!
> 
> ~Vossel
> 
> 
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