[Asterisk-Users] My contribution to the issue of code- reversal

[Federico Alves]

Four years ago, I faced a real dilemma in my business: the Visual Voice PRI
dll had a bug that considered unanswered any call after ringing for 20
seconds. This bug was in fact killing my business, because for international
calling, the setup of the call was already close to 20 seconds on many
cases. Furthermore, the vendor, Artisoft, had cowardly sold the software to
Dialogic, and Intel-Dialogic had killed the product. There was no support. I
had to bite the bullet and buy a reverse-assembler (IDA-Pro), from a Belgium
company. I had to lock myself down in the lab for a week, until I understood
the location of exactly the right byte that was wrong, and replaced it at a
binary level for a 40 hex. Bingo. I made a living out of selling my pre-paid
platform for another two years, until I adapted Asterisk to replace Dialogic
and now I am paying my bills thanks to Asterisk. If I had not solved, my
existing clients would have looked elsewhere for a solution, and I had
failed to sell more switches. If Visual Voice had been open-source, I would
not had faced the terrible pressure to understand every single step of
assembler code required. So we need to reverse code and it surely is a
legitimate operation. Open source is far more convenient, but how do we
charge for the product? The business model is not there: the more popular
the product is, the more remote the possibility of the creator making any
money from it. Take Digium. The more experts on Asterisk pop-up, the less
demand is for Digium services. In fact, having tried Asterisk support from
Digium and others, I think the best Asterisk people --like Jeremy, Shido and
swk286-- are somewhere else. So the question is: how do we make sure that
the creator of the product makes even one dollar from every copy put in use
of his creation? The answer is: there is no answer. There is where Microsoft
wins. Additionally, Microsoft support services do know their products, and
if they fail to behave, they fix it. Digium made me once spend $150 and they
could not make res_odbc work, etc. I stopped using Digium support because
there is no way to know how many hours or dollars is going to take to fix
anything, while with others I pay for the result, not for the time. The
success is guaranteed. Regarding open-source-closed source, the future holds
a mixed-model in the store, and we are yet to discover it.