[asterisk-users] where is 1.4.12?

[Matt]

> I agree with Russell's initial assessment; Matt's phrasing, if not his
> intent, emanated from the land of the troll. . . if for no other reason
> than the implication that Digium is solely responsible for the
> development of the product.
>

I want to reply to this....   my initial comments were not trolls.
I think, however, my initial comments reflect what alot of the
asterisk community is experiencing.    WE support asterisk for people.
  WE also sell phone systems based somewhat around the asterisk
platform.    WE run several asterisk softswitches to support our VoIP
infrastructure.  That being said, we have several folks who know
asterisk almost like the back of.. something (does anyone really know
what the back of their hand looks like?).     It's rather embarrassing
for us to have to say to a client.. well it looks like the version of
asterisk you loaded has a bunch of bugs.. why don't you roll it back
to this version?  CLIENT: But but.. it's the newest, shouldn't it
work?   It just reflects poorly on Digium/Asterisk in general.

Keeping in mind that asterisk is free.... let's think about what
happens when the first time user goes to use asterisk.   If it happens
to be one of these versions with a fairly decent bug in it, their
experience of Digium/asterisk is going to be bad, yea they may even go
to a competitor (blah this asterisk @#$@#$ doesn't work, the CFO was
right, let's get a Cisco CM system).

While Asterisk is released free, let us not forget that Digium makes
money off of ABE (and I'd be willing to bet that many who have
purchased ABE started out on the free version.. remember first
impressions are everything).    Digium also makes money off of the
FXO/FXS/PRI cards, which you really wouldn't use unless you were
running asterisk.   So in this case, while Asterisk IS free, it is
both a first impression to people who download it, as well as a money
source as people require a PSTN interface for their free asterisk
version.