[Asterisk-Users] - ACAN - the Asterisk Comprehensive Archive Network (was RE: GPL thoughts)

[Adam Goryachev]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 13:37, Jim Van Meggelen wrote:
> People will want to pay for your expertise because you wrote (or at
> least contributed to) the base platform, or language, or what-have-you.
> The more one contributes, the more their credibility is established --
> their services gain value. This holds true not only for individuals, but
> for companies as well.
> 
> Rather than people trying to lock their "brilliance" away so only they
> can use it, I'd rather like to envision something such as the Perl folks
> have; ACAN, the Asterisk Comprehensive Archive Network (we need a better
> acronym, but I digress).
> 
> Folks would contribute all kinds of interesting dialplan functions,
> which can tyhen be downloaded (and improved!) by the community. Some of
> them are junk; the crucible that is open-source will either weed them
> out, or fix them. The best in class will rise to the top, and become the
> standard way of solving a particular challenge. There will always be
> choice.

I did try to setup something along those lines. A couple of times I
tried to encourage people to use the repository I setup, AFAIK, it has
never been used, not that I've really worried/worked on it since it was
never used...

See http://www.websitemanagers.com.au/asterisk/

I have run/maintained www.deadcat.net for a long time (6 or more years I
think) which is basically the same sort of thing for Big Brother (cross
platform monitoring/alarming system). Many, many people who have asked
the usual questions "Which is better BB or xyz?", are always told that
the library of add-ons/patches/etc available on the deadcat website make
it the better choice by far.

So, it would be nice to have people saying the same things when
comparing some cisco CM solution to asterisk, etc... ie, look at <blah>
because it has loads of AGI scripts to do almost anything you want,
dialplan samples, patches, etc...

Of course, most patches belong on the bug tracker, but some don't (if
they will never be accepted into the cvs for example)...

Anyway, all of this is just my own opinion, yours may vary.

If people have comments regarding the website, or how it could be made
more useful (apart from actually having some content), please let me
know.

Finally, just because you haven't authored something, doesn't stop you
from uploading it to the website (as long as you have the right to
re-distribute the work, which the GPL allows).

Regards,
Adam