[Asterisk-Users] Re: www.openpbx.org

[Matt Riddell]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> Actually Digium gave the core of Asterisk.  There is a *lot* of code in there 
> that didn't come FROM Digium, but rather that Digium has incorporated and 
> made a part of Asterisk.

Of course!! Well understood and agreed.

> Further, I think the *vast* majority of the issues people have with Digium and 
> Asterisk have nothing to do with licensing but rather the feelings of 
> abandonment and undisclosed and undocumented development coming FROM Digium.  
> Things HAVE gotten better significantly over the last little while (I 
> constantly point to Kevin Fleming's hiring as the turning point) but from 
> "the outside" it really does feel like a lot of the issues people bring up 
> with Asterisk and Asterisk Development are flippantly written off by Mark, if 
> not just silently ignored.  Issues with hardware, issues with software... 
> some with patches that seem to work very well are just ignored in favour of 
> some new feature or implementation of an old feature.  It's very infuriating.

But why couldn't it have been brought into the public forum and discussed?

> Now I'm not one of the OpenPBX "folk"; I still run and work on and complain 
> about Asterisk.  I *want* to see Mark, and to a bigger degree Digium, 
> succeed.  I am doing what I can to help that happen.  The OpenPBX fork 
> happened for very real and very important issues, and I do hope that Mark and 
> Digium takes notice and doesn't just write off these people or their 
> reasonings.  In the same vein, I hope that the OpenPBX fork finds its 
> original reasons again, because the talk in the IRC channel and such has 
> shifted significantly.  It's no longer about "fixing Asterisk's problems," 
> it's about new paradigms and core rewrites and total scalability...  It very 
> very much feels to me that it's all about ego now and not about anything 
> technical.

Hmmm I don't know.  I have heard rumours of things like ./configure which
would be really nice if they were in Asterisk.

> There are some very, very smart people working on it, people I am personally 
> saddened to see shift their focus off of Asterisk, and I hope that Digium is 
> too.  However if they don't regain their focus we'll end up with YAOSTP -- 
> Yet Another Open Source Telephony Project -- and one that looks like it will 
> be forever stuck in the design phase.  I've been in design and development 
> for over ten years now and it's always sad to see this kind of thing happen.

Indeed.  Coupled with a bad day, it's incredibly sad.  But I'm sure as time
passes on, the wounds will be healed and as someone else stated, code will
begin to flow in both directions.  After all there will be no easier platform
to port code between than another Asterisk-based system.

> Forks *can* be good.  I am part of the Vexi Project (http://www.vexi.org) fork 
> from Ibex (nee XWT).  This was a good fork.  OpenPBX could be another good 
> fork.  Only time will tell.

Agreed.  It's nice to have a measured rather than inflammatory post on the
subject (I say this full well knowing I have been flaming for the past hour),
as it acts to slightly dampen the situation and allows all to view it in a
more measured manner.

As you say, only time will tell.

-- 
Cheers,

Matt Riddell
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