MichiganTelephone
Guru
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2009
- Messages
- 258
- Reaction score
- 0
After I posted a comment in my blog saying the same thing I said above, Jonathan Rose showed up again and left this:
I guess the first thought that jumps out at me is this: There are a lot of open source projects out there that never forget their roots. But it seems to me that the Asterisk folks have kind of forgotten that if it weren't for all the hobbyists and other non-commercial users that were willing to try Asterisk in the first place, it would have never developed to the point where it could be used reasonably reliably in a commercial setting. My second thought is, why did they even release Google Voice support in the first place if they were only going to effectively abandon it?
Since we still don't know if Google Voice will continue their service (as we know it today) into 2012, I'll refrain from going off on a major rant (not that it would help anything anyway). But this just confirms my suspicion that Asterisk may have had its day in the sun as far as the experimenters and hobbyists are concerned, but now it's time for something else (FreeSWITCH?) to take the stage.
I've pretty much stopped writing any new articles about Asterisk and things Asterisk-related because of attitudes like this. If they want to suddenly try to put the squeeze on us for money, they can find some other way to support their products. Ward, you've written many thousands of words in support of Asterisk and brought many users into the Asterisk fold — did Digium ever offer to compensate you for all you've done for them? And yet now they want money to fix an issue in a module that they developed, but that's primarily used in non-corporate settings? It just really feels like they have forgotten all the "little people" who helped them get to where they are today.
I'm not even going to comment on developers not being allowed to take bounties vs. the solicitation to purchase a support license. You say tomato, I say… either way, they're basically saying that someone's going to have to pay before this gets fixed.Michigantelephone: Well, while I agree that it’s frustrating that we can’t cover the Google Voice issue right now, it’s just a fact of life that we only have so many full-time programmers on call and we have to prioritize issues based on what appears most important to the most significant portions of our user-base. It might seem somehow dirty for an open source software company to suggest purchasing a support license if you want certain things prioritized, but the fact of the matter is that people (programmers included) don’t work for free and the only way we can get to issues like this faster is if we have more programmers, and the only way to hire more programmers is to have more revenue with which to pay said programmers. That’s a big part of why support customers get priority for their issues in the first place. If we have more support customers and if we keep the ones we have happy, then we can afford to hire more programmers who can in turn get more problems like this resolved.
Unfortunately, Google Voice falls into a sort of niche category where it’s a really cool feature to talk about among enthusiasts, but it just hasn’t been that much of an issue for the large scale resellers and other such Asterisk users who would actually be likely to have a support subscription.
For the record though, I wasn’t suggesting that you offer any of us a bounty. We wouldn’t be allowed to work on it anyway in that case. That’s just something you could offer as an incentive to get community developers interested. Digium developers aren’t allowed to take bounties, even on their personal time.
I guess the first thought that jumps out at me is this: There are a lot of open source projects out there that never forget their roots. But it seems to me that the Asterisk folks have kind of forgotten that if it weren't for all the hobbyists and other non-commercial users that were willing to try Asterisk in the first place, it would have never developed to the point where it could be used reasonably reliably in a commercial setting. My second thought is, why did they even release Google Voice support in the first place if they were only going to effectively abandon it?
Since we still don't know if Google Voice will continue their service (as we know it today) into 2012, I'll refrain from going off on a major rant (not that it would help anything anyway). But this just confirms my suspicion that Asterisk may have had its day in the sun as far as the experimenters and hobbyists are concerned, but now it's time for something else (FreeSWITCH?) to take the stage.
I've pretty much stopped writing any new articles about Asterisk and things Asterisk-related because of attitudes like this. If they want to suddenly try to put the squeeze on us for money, they can find some other way to support their products. Ward, you've written many thousands of words in support of Asterisk and brought many users into the Asterisk fold — did Digium ever offer to compensate you for all you've done for them? And yet now they want money to fix an issue in a module that they developed, but that's primarily used in non-corporate settings? It just really feels like they have forgotten all the "little people" who helped them get to where they are today.