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

[Dean Collins]

Thanks Olle,

Concentrating on your 3rd point;

> 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.


Can you offer some suggestions or advice about how best to license these
applications?

Is tying it to a nic address like the G729 model a good idea?

Is there a better way to do this? How does this affect applications that
might run on a users pc in a client mode?

What should we be aware of when trying to design a licensing schema like
this?


Cheers,
Dean 





> -----Original Message-----
> From: Johansson Olle E [mailto:oej at edvina.net]
> Sent: Monday, 5 May 2008 12:22 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Cc: Dean Collins
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] FW: Asterisk 3rd party developed
commercial
> software sales licensing platform
> 
> 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>