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

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Olle E. Johansson wrote:

> I think we agree to disagree. Regardless of the featureset, I believe any new product will be compared with other offerings on the market to see if the Asterisk dev team and Digium are taking the right direction.

There is a very important point to be made here: you say "the Asterisk
dev team and Digium", as if those resources are being redirected away
from Asterisk and onto Hydra; that is not in fact true, to a large
extent. Other than myself (and I am not an Asterisk primary developer
any longer) and Josh Colp (who was taken from the Asterisk team, but for
good reason and after much complex and painful discussion), we have not
taken any resources from the Asterisk dev team at Digium at all, and we
have no plans to do so in the future unless we can replace those
resources at the same time. Digium's resources applied to Asterisk will
continue to be applied to Asterisk, and the development and release
plans of Asterisk will remain essentially unchanged in spite of the
Hydra project, *except* for any possible fundamental architectural
redesigns (which of course are what prompted Hydra's existence in the
first place).

Now granted, pulling some of you into Hydra will necessarily reduce your
contributions to Asterisk, as you have only a limited amount of time to
be awake and writing code every day. In fact, we've made our initial
plans to be able to achieve our next milestone without requiring *any*
code contribution from community developers (although it's most
certainly welcome), specifically because until the day arrives that
Hydra is something you can use in your business(es) in even a minimal
capacity, you won't be able to justify redirecting your own development
time off of Asterisk. That's perfectly fine, expected, and planned for
as best we can.

So, to summarize, part of trying to ensure that the situation Olle fears
does not materialize is talking about this in the proper way: we are
*not* stopping, reducing, or otherwise negatively impacting the efforts
of the Asterisk development team at Digium so that we can work on Hydra
(except for one person, as I mentioned above). Believe me when I say
this was a very difficult decision to make, and it means that a number
of very talented and capable developers aren't getting to work full time
on 'the fun stuff' (at least not in the near term) because we just
cannot allow Asterisk to suffer. If it came down a decision being
required between proceeding with Hydra and keeping Asterisk viable,
Hydra would lose, every time. We are very fortunate to not be in that
situation, and that Digium's management team has agreed to allow us to
develop Hydra using new resources because they feel (like we do) that
it's the right thing to do for Digium's long term health, because it's
also the right thing to do for the *community's* long term health (at
least based on the interactions we've had with the community over the
last couple of years).

As long as we can make the point to people that this is a new project
using mostly new resources and directed at providing new solutions to
long-suffering problems, most people will get the point. Granted, there
will be many who just decide this is Asterisk 2.0 and will move in that
direction, and that's unavoidable.

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