Not to continue or feed any flame wars, because flame wars and holy
wars only create hurt feelings. However, this is my personal
experience:<br>
<br>
To the contrary I have found Digiums support to be exceptional.
They have helped support me with several minor and small problems, and
all I did was buy hardware. In fact, when my soft switch was
sending calling id and called id on my PRI out of spec, Matt was quick
to write a patch to get me back up and running. This hardly fell
in their realm of things they are required to support. If you
receive support less then par the one person you are speaking to may be
having a bad day. It's human nature and I have to work with my
callcenter manager on this same problem with her employees. Ask
to speak to someone else! I always try to find a specific person
I like and I work well with in situations like this, and I never have
another problem.<br>
<br>
Once in 2003 when needing support for my new single port t1 span, Mark
answered the support line. How cool is it that a company is so
dedicated to support that when a CEOs technicians get busy, he helps on
the phones.<br>
<br>
I feel it is very important to have a Business Edition, and Digium is
the only company with the ability to provide this within the letter of
the law. MySQL does this very thing with a supported version of
MySQL, it's called "MySQL Network." Even though MySQL has wanted
in on the support front by providing a "Business Edition," they have
continued their open source stable releases in a timely manner as well,
I love 4.1.<br>
<br>
So as far as digium being less likely to allow for new stable versions,
I highly doubt it. The great thing is, you know, and everyone
else knows that if Digium
ceased supporting the open source version, the open source release
would fork off in to other versions as long as we followed the existing
open
source license. Besides, for the most part CVS is managed by people
that do not directly work with them, and stable releases are decided by
mostly developers in the community.<br>
<br>
Large companies enjoy the reassurance, and $995 is a very small capital
expenditure for a 16 million dollar a year company (the company i work
for) that wants to enjoy the reassurance of technical
support. The closed source nature of it is here, nor there.
If you want the source to CVS HEAD or STABLE, check it out. For
them to *really* support a product *really* well they have to
certify a product has X code, Y features, and works on Z hardware and
you haven't added any odd random problems to the equation and nature of
the business edition through patches you brewed.<br>
<br>
Mark has always been quick to do the right thing for the community as
well. In fact, talks of Asterisk 1.2 at Astricon have been
rumoured, and I know we will continue to get a very great and valuable
stable branch.. This is a symbiotic relationship. Digium
and all of you great developers provide an excellent tree of
Asterisk. The community enjoys the best most flexible PBX
ever-to-date, and Digium makes money, saves our companies money, and
provide an outlet to make an exponential amount of money in the VoIP
arena... I have a feeling digium is not interested in breaking
this wonderful symbiotic relationship by burning its customers.<br>
<br>
So I prefer to feed my Digium friends who work the oddest long hard
hours bringing us very cool products, and get a little extra added
support. If you disagree, check out a copy of CVS/HEAD or
CVS/STABLE, and get community support from the mailing lists =)<br>
<br>
Your friend, <br>
Brian McManus<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/18/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">Kevin Walsh</b> <<a href="mailto:kevin@cursor.biz">kevin@cursor.biz</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
KRTorio [<a href="mailto:krtorio@gmail.com">krtorio@gmail.com</a>] wrote:<br>> For $995+ (including support), a technical manual, and scripts, is it<br>> worth switching to the business edition?<br>><br>Absolutely not. If you find that you need $995 worth of support, some
<br>time in the future, then I'm sure that you can obtain it from one of<br>several providers. I don't think it's worth paying up-front for<br>something you probably won't need, but that's really for you to decide.<br><br>
If you really want to pay $995 for a closed source product with "some<br>features removed and license control added," then go for it. It's<br>your money.<br><br>--<br>
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_/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/<br> _/_/_/
_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/
K e v i n W a l s h<br> _/
_/ _/ _/
_/
_/ _/ _/_/ <a href="mailto:kevin@cursor.biz">kevin@cursor.biz</a><br>_/
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