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

[Tzafrir Cohen]

Hi

Broken into paragraphs, so people can actually read. I will not address
the content, as it has been rehashed ienough here and elsewhere. 

Please read, e.g. http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html before
posting anything in reply to this thread or anything similar.

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 08:12:07AM -0400, Federico Alves wrote:
> 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.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jbr.cohens.org.il | VIM is
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