[Asterisk-Users] Business Edition

[Brian McManus]

Not to continue or feed any flame wars, because flame wars and holy wars 
only create hurt feelings. However, this is my personal experience:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 =)

Your friend, 
Brian McManus

On 7/18/05, Kevin Walsh <kevin at cursor.biz> wrote:
> 
> KRTorio [krtorio at gmail.com] wrote:
> > For $995+ (including support), a technical manual, and scripts, is it
> > worth switching to the business edition?
> >
> Absolutely not. If you find that you need $995 worth of support, some
> time in the future, then I'm sure that you can obtain it from one of
> several providers. I don't think it's worth paying up-front for
> something you probably won't need, but that's really for you to decide.
> 
> If you really want to pay $995 for a closed source product with "some
> features removed and license control added," then go for it. It's
> your money.
> 
> --
> _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/
> _/_/_/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ K e v i n W a l s h
> _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ kevin at cursor.biz
> _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/
> 
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