[Asterisk-Users] CE certification for Europe

[Steven Critchfield]

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 15:32, d hinton wrote:
> first off the majority of work on the cards was made by zapata guys, let's
> give them the credit. secondly are you talking about hardward support or
> asterisk software support?

I may be a little off, but I'm pretty sure the original was a ISA card
and is effectively useless in current systems due to lack of ISA slots.
So the work the original zapata implementers did that is brought forward
is mostly the software. As I understand, the current PCI cards are more
than surface mounted hardware, and the fact that is was updated to run
on a PCI bus must have taken a lot of work. I also know that the one
person that had been assembling the ISA cards stopped doing it because
the time spent wasn't worth the money.

> let's deal with drivers first: the original was released by zapata guy's as
> GLP'ed software and any derivertive of that work sould also be GPL'ed. and
> yes we would support any drivers built by us and maybe even some that are
> not. but that's what open source is about. a group of people working
> together to make a piece of software the best it could be.

Drivers built by you? are you planning a fork of the driver, or are you
refering to a different platform that isn't currently being supported? 

> now on to the hardware support; digium provides one hour support with their
> cards. that would be about $700 per hour for support. thanks but no thanks.
> times are too hard for those prices :-D

See you drop back to the assumption that the software has no value, and
the updates have no value. That $700 you quoted gets you an hour of
phone support, and all the upcoming software updates to the driver and
possibly a little more priority when asking questions to Mark in an
online forum. His help has been invaluable for diagnosing problems and
pointing towards better solutions. Then you can add in the fact that
Mark can continue for that mutch longer doing asterisk development as
his job. 

BTW, if you think times are too tough for those prices, you are only
going to contribute to the problem. Port for port, zapata hardware is
still much more cost effective than other providers of similar hardware
with no where near the support.

> also we're getting off base here, my intent was NOT to bash digium for their
> prices but rather find a way to get people without the huge budget of a
> great company like yours, to be able to add to the project in a meaningful
> way. few can at the current pricing schema, that's why the original makers
> sold it at ~$250 USD and released it GPL in the first place. just my two

The original developers didn't sell them. There was another guy who was
building them in his spare time and found it wasn't worth doing it. They
were not factory built, nor were they warantied. 

If you want to be part of the comunity, don't try to undercut the cards.
Go after the channel bank market. There is a place where people can be
undercut quite a bit and still make insane profits. Not to mention
outside of ebay finds, it is the most expensive part of the roll out of
a asterisk machine. For my home machine, had it not been for an ebay
find, I would not have been able to build the asterisk machine for home.
The card wasn't outside the price range, just the cost of a new channel
bank.

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>