[asterisk-users] [asterisk-dev] Unstable releases lately

[Jared Smith]

On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 08:35 -0500, David Boyd wrote:
> Maybe Digium doesn't care if they lose community support as they have been
> successful in bringing in investment that will carry them forward as they
> deploy more commercial product

Absolutely not.  Digium cares *very deeply* about the open-source
community, and realizes that without the community it wouldn't be
anywhere as successful as it is today.  Russell Bryant leads the
Asterisk development team at Digium, and has about a dozen developers
working for him.  Those dozen or so developers spend almost 100% of
their time working on the open-source version of Asterisk.  Over 90% of
their time is currently spent on bug tracker fixing bugs and handling
the feature requests (or at least the ones that come with code
attached).  There are some more statistics available in the mailing list
archives [1] on the exact nature of the work the development team has
been doing, if you want the nitty-gritty details.

In addition to that, Digium extends a lot of resources to the community
besides just the development team.  There's infrastructure (mailing
lists, forums, and SVN repositories just to name a few), as well as a
lot of adjunct services such as conferences, support for Asterisk users
groups, documentation, etc.  Obviously if Digium had unlimited resources
it could do a lot more... but as it is we're constrained by our current
resources in the number of things we can do.  At the same time, I think
you'd be hard-pressed to find any other company in the open source
telephony space that does more to help the community.

Obviously we're open to suggestions on how to improve the process, and
I'm 100% committed to making sure there's lots of open and honest dialog
between the community and Digium.  That's why I took this job in the
first place.  If you have questions or concerns, drop me an email and
I'll do what I can to help you.

[1]http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/2008-January/024819.html

-- 
Jared Smith
Community Relations Manager
Digium, Inc.