Fwd: [Asterisk-Users] Prices of g729 codec

[Jon Lewis]

On 6/3/06, Kevin P. Fleming <kpfleming at digium.com> wrote:
> 
> ----- Sahil Gupta <sgupta at voicevalley.com.au> wrote:
>> We recently had around 60-80 licenses become useless because Digium
>> refused to renew the keys on that.  That was a bit of money kissed
>> goodbye.
>
> Unless you had been clearly abusing the key licensing system, our
> support department will never refuse to enable a new registration on
> your license key(s). There is no 'renew the keys', though, since they
> don't expire.

I hope that's the actual official policy now.  There seems to have been 
some internal conflict or communications failure at Digium a few months 
ago as to whether or how many times a g729 license key can be reset.

As a service provider (you could call us an Asterisk ASP), we regularly 
build & host systems for customers, retire/upgrade systems, swap out 
hardware, add interfaces, etc. which causes problems with the g729 
licensing.

In one attempt a few months ago to get a license reset, I was initially 
told it was now policy that Digium would only reset the registration count 
once, and after that, you were SOL (or forced to play MAC address changing 
games or as someone else posted, try hacking around the license key code).

In that particular case, the customer's server had suffered a 2 disk RAID 
failure, and to get them back online, I moved them to a lower end system 
(what was readily available) while we waited for parts to get their dual 
xeon server back online.  Both motherboards had built-in dual ethernets.

IMO, locking the licensing to a piece of system thats often built-in, has 
been very annoying.  I think I'd be happier if it was locked to some sort 
of dongle (parallel, or more likely today, USB).  At least that way, we 
could easily move the key anytime we needed to.  It would be a bit of a 
pain any time a system needed to quickly be transfered to hardware already 
at another location.

The TRX idea sounds appealing, but I wonder how they'll handle servers 
that don't have internet access.  Not all VOIP servers are on the 
internet.

I've actually wondered if we could legally use Intel's code in cases where 
we have licenses bought from Digium, but they're not re-registerable 
because Digium wouldn't reset the use count.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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