[Asterisk-Users] digitnetworks card issues?

[Scott Laird]

On Sep 3, 2004, at 10:12 AM, Kevin Walsh wrote:
> Competition is a good thing, in my view.
>
> I didn't find out about the non-Digium X100P cards until after I'd
> bought mine (for use at home).  If I'd known then I probably would have
> avoided the massive markup and bought one of the "clones".  These days,
> I'd recommend a Sipura SPA-3000.

I think the specific point of the pro-Digium anti-clone argument is 
this:

There's nothing inherently special about the X100P.  It's really just a 
$10 winmodem.  The *only* reason that anyone cares about it is because 
Digium spent the money to develop an Asterisk driver for it.  They 
recoup their costs for developing the X100 driver (and Asterisk itself) 
by selling the card at an impressive markup.  From a simple economic 
standpoint, this isn't really a rational move on their part--there's no 
simple reason for people to pay $100 to them when they could pay $15 to 
newegg or someone on ebay.  However, the very fact that they're willing 
to go out on a limb like this is rather endearing to a lot of us.  
They've spent years building Asterisk and giving it away for free.  In 
exchange, we've paid the markup on their PCI cards as a sort of proxy 
for paying for Asterisk itself, and we encourage others to do the same. 
  It's our way of keeping Asterisk economically viable while waiting for 
the VoIP market to mature.  Digium gave us Asterisk, along with 
relatively inexpensive hardware, and in exchange, we've given them a 
bit more cash then we strictly had to.


Scott