[asterisk-users] FW: Asterisk 3rd party developed commercial software sales licensing platform

[Johansson Olle E]

Dean,

I think this is really an interesting topic. However, you list a lot  
of issues that can propably fill many conference calls. I'll try to  
comment on a few that is important to me.

Please note that Digium has taken a few steps to enable a 3rd party  
Asterisk Marketplace, right now hosted on their web. I personally  
think the marketplace deserves a separate address, but think it's a  
good first step that needs feedback from companies working with  
Asterisk. It's fairly cheap and Digium needs your feedback on this and  
where you want this to go. I applaud any effort for the thousands of  
small Asterisk entrepreneurs out there. 3COMs and PolyComs have  
marketing money to join the partner program for the "big guys", but  
most Asterisk companies have not.

Another issue that you touch is Digium's licensing for small scale  
OEM's. Being able to create an application based on Asterisk source  
code with source addons and start selling it on a small scale. That's  
very hard today. OEM agreements seems to start on 3Com levels, not on  
the typical "innovative Asterisk company" levels. If enough of us  
discuss this with Digium and show missed oppurtunities, I hope they  
will listen. The dual licensing scheme is useful in some situations,  
but I wished it was more reachable for small companies with smaller  
projects that aims to be worldwide and global within months... :-)

A very different one is bountys or sponsorships in general. I've been  
a proud receiver of a good sponsorship from Voop from a long time, up  
until the company failed in December last year. After that, I've found  
no one interested in sponsoring my work or funding my pet project  
Codename Pineapple (only a few fans that want to sponsor parts of it -  
thank you).

Even funding small projects seems to get more negative feedback ("He's  
profiting on open source") than positive support (one offer of 10  
dollars). My personal opinion is that I from my Swedish horizon see  
Digium employing more and more developers focused on the Open Source  
project, but very few other companies contribute on a regular basis to  
the project. This might be the nature of Open Source - more takers  
than contributors, but I was naive enough to believe it would change  
over time.

A third item is the ability for a marketplace for addons that doesn't  
require licensing from Digium. Tools that connect over manager and/or  
AGI/FastAGI. I think we could be better at putting these to market  
than we are - internally in the community. I've seen plenty of tools  
during my meetings with community people at conferences and trainings,  
tools that could find resellers and distributors world-wide if we had  
the internal network for it. There's a large group of Asterisk system  
integrators with very similar customer bases and projects world wide.  
Together, we would be bigger than many of the companies we see as  
large companies. Look at the size of Digium/Asterisk world booths at  
VON the last years compared with Cisco, Avaya etc - by working  
together we show our strength and will get larget deals.

That was my 10 cents during a lab in the Asterisk SIP MasterClass in  
Barcelona, where we work hard to build scalable networks with Asterisk  
and OpenSER.

Cheers,
/Olle

PS. If anyone is interested in sponsoring my Asterisk(TM) work,  
contact me off list. </shameless plug>