[asterisk-biz] Plea to support a much neededfunctionforCallCentersin Asterisk.

[BJ Weschke]

On 1/27/06, Alexander Lopez <alex.lopez at opsys.com> wrote:
>
> After my reponce, I will try to center this post once again, and ask if anyone is willing to do halp out let me know.
>
> I have a few offers already. If you have code or feature request that you would like to submit please by all means do so.
>
> Response below!!
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
> > [mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Zoa
> > Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 12:14 PM
> > To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
> > Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Plea to support a much
> > neededfunctionforCallCentersin Asterisk.
> >
> >
> > Well that all depends, if some company invest X months in
> > making something, they are not going to give it away for
> > free, (unless they are making money on something else like
> > support or hardware).
> > If you could buy a license and pay lets say a few hundred
> > euro's to use this, it might be interesting for you and for
> > them, but they will not make it open source for that amount
> > of money. (Unless they want to take somebody else out of
> > business by taking away his customers.)
> >
> > If you pay for the complete development + some profit, yes it
> > could make it to the gpl, but it will cost you a multitude of that.
> >
> > Lots of people want everything for free (im not pointing at
> > you btw, im just talking in general) , but don't actually
> > contribute anything theirselves. And guess what, they also
> > want free support on those free things and they will bitch at
> > you when something breaks. (e.g. with the timebom bug)
> >
> > Zoa.
> >
> > Nicolás Gudiño wrote:
> >
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>     Any deal that does not put this back into the community is not
> > >>     considered a good deal.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>> I disagree.  If he has something that he has developed
> > and wants to
> > >>> sell it for $20 or $50 (or more depending on the value of the
> > >>> feature to the end user), I would call that a good deal.
> > >>
> > >
> > > If it's an independent software not linked to asterisk,
> > that's ok. But
> > > a modification to the asterisk GPL source code, requiring
> > you to buy a
> > > commercial license because they are not willing to contribute the
> > > modifications back to the community, then it is *not* in the GPL
> > > spirit, and IMHO not a good deal at all.
> > >
> > > It's like Didium selling a commercial version with features NOT
> > > INCLUDED in the GPL version. I'm sure nobody will like
> > something like
> > > that, specially because of the disclaimers/dual license model.
> > >
> > > Just my 2 cents..
> > >
> > >
> >
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>
> The customer that complains 90% of the time takes 9 times longer to pay and wants a 50% discount on everything!! I learned this a while ago.
>
> While I am in business to make money, I also realize that I would not have the business I have today if it weren't for some very giving and unselfish people. Asterisk is what it is today because of the effort many have put forth and the openness of the project.
>
> I agree that value and price are not always connected and that a Non-GPLed version as well as a full GPLed version have different roles and positioning. I agree with all sides of the argument.
>
> But herein is my opinion. I fell that this is a MAJOR code change, requiring the input or blessing from all that are responcable for the architechture and future path of Asterisk (Digium). This patch, feature, rearchitecture, will require the changes to be applied to the base bridging code. The is the main function of what Asterisk does (bridge) This affects all channels and therefore all applications, this is not something that I would like to spend time and or money on and then have a few svn commits break or cause havoc. The only way I see that we (community) can gaurantee, if posible, the maintainance of new features is to include them into the current development tree.  Digium has made great efforts into helping developers obtian this. The conversion from CVS to SVN was a great step in that direction.
>
> I have seen Asterisk grow from a simple application to what is is today, A FULL FEATURED PBX TOOLKIT.
>

 I'm not really sure it would require any modifications to bridging. I
mean, that's one way to approach it, but I'd think you probably could
achieve what you're looking to do in a slightly easier (less time
intensive and core code invasive) way by using the Zap mux channel in
app_meetme in a creative sort of way.

 This is something we're interested in doing (as time allows) as we do
have some call center products that would probably benefit from having
it. If we were to do it, I would tell you that this would go back into
Asterisk (as all of our core Asterisk changes do) and our management
products would probably integrate with the feature by Manager action
or some other hook that we'd code and make available.

--
Bird's The Word Technologies, Inc.
http://www.btwtech.com/