[Asterisk-Users] Free Software or not -- that's the question /* New subject */

[Brian Capouch]

asterisk at lists.styx.org wrote:
> 
> And why is this unnecessary cruft included in the source 
> tree? So that Digium can leverage the Free Software
> community into developing proprietary software for 
> them.
> 
> Am I way off the mark?
> 

I think you're unfairly impugning Digium's motives.  And I also think 
you're--again--salting your post with enough innuendo that a reasonable 
person might suspect you of flame-baiting.

I suscribe to the mailing lists of several OS VoIP solutions, as I'm 
sure do many others on this list.  There is nothing out there like 
asterisk, in terms of it functionality, or the body of minds that have 
collected to work on it.  I have recently found myself embarking on a 
mini-career doing fundamental-level VoIP training to network operators, 
technology freaks, and even some small-telco tech people. I take along a 
laptop with asterisk on it and do a little song-and-dance that shows off 
some of its gee-whiz features.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that almost always people's 
mouths drop open in amazement at what all that asterisk can do.  It's 
comical sometimes how affected people are.

So I have all this functionality, and I have all the source code to it, 
and I can legally keep it forever at this (mostly happy) level of 
functionality, and if Digium drops off the face of the earth, I can 
start with what's there ("we can start with what's there"; I know I 
won't be alone) and keep going should that happen.

So I can look at the same set of facts that you do, but in my mind 
Digium is not the nefarious would-be crook that you imply in your 
postings, but rather a brilliant and disruptive force upon the telco 
world.  And they are a *business,* and as many of the people reading 
this sentence are bound to know, one trick of the Open Source world is 
to figure out how to keep things open and free and at the same time how 
to keep bread on the table and enough cashflow to keep up with the 
technology (VoIP in this case) Joneses.

I cannot guess your motives, but I'm pretty sure that I *do* know what 
Digium's motives are, and they are innocuous and altruistic instead of 
the way you portray them.

Where are you trying to take this?

B.