[Asterisk-Users] Re: www.openpbx.org

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Sunday 09 October 2005 09:08, Matt Riddell wrote:
> Digium gave you Asterisk, and yet you turn around and stab them in the
> back. As this is the Asterisk Users mailing list and this product will
> cease to be Asterisk the moment it is forked, I don't really want to see
> any more spamming from the OpenPBX crew.

Actually Digium gave the core of Asterisk.  There is a *lot* of code in there 
that didn't come FROM Digium, but rather that Digium has incorporated and 
made a part of Asterisk.

Further, I think the *vast* majority of the issues people have with Digium and 
Asterisk have nothing to do with licensing but rather the feelings of 
abandonment and undisclosed and undocumented development coming FROM Digium.  
Things HAVE gotten better significantly over the last little while (I 
constantly point to Kevin Fleming's hiring as the turning point) but from 
"the outside" it really does feel like a lot of the issues people bring up 
with Asterisk and Asterisk Development are flippantly written off by Mark, if 
not just silently ignored.  Issues with hardware, issues with software... 
some with patches that seem to work very well are just ignored in favour of 
some new feature or implementation of an old feature.  It's very infuriating.

Now I'm not one of the OpenPBX "folk"; I still run and work on and complain 
about Asterisk.  I *want* to see Mark, and to a bigger degree Digium, 
succeed.  I am doing what I can to help that happen.  The OpenPBX fork 
happened for very real and very important issues, and I do hope that Mark and 
Digium takes notice and doesn't just write off these people or their 
reasonings.  In the same vein, I hope that the OpenPBX fork finds its 
original reasons again, because the talk in the IRC channel and such has 
shifted significantly.  It's no longer about "fixing Asterisk's problems," 
it's about new paradigms and core rewrites and total scalability...  It very 
very much feels to me that it's all about ego now and not about anything 
technical.

There are some very, very smart people working on it, people I am personally 
saddened to see shift their focus off of Asterisk, and I hope that Digium is 
too.  However if they don't regain their focus we'll end up with YAOSTP -- 
Yet Another Open Source Telephony Project -- and one that looks like it will 
be forever stuck in the design phase.  I've been in design and development 
for over ten years now and it's always sad to see this kind of thing happen.

Forks *can* be good.  I am part of the Vexi Project (http://www.vexi.org) fork 
from Ibex (nee XWT).  This was a good fork.  OpenPBX could be another good 
fork.  Only time will tell.

-A.