Asterisk (geek girl)

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 08:25 -0700, JD Austin wrote:
> Craig White wrote: 

> > that was really, really bad. I found that this comment from Kerry
> > Garrison, Trixbox Community Director to be most disappointing in that he
> > found it so easy to justify...
> > 
> > "This is getting far off the mark here. We are going to fix this so that
> > it is easy to opt out of the program. If everyone opts out, we have no
> > data, if we have no data, then we lose the financial support of our
> > partners. If we lose the finanicial support of our partners, I lose my
> > funding, if I lose my funding, I lose my team. If I lose my team we have
> > no development on CE."
> > 
> > This type of thinking flies in the face of the open source community. If
> > the corporate partners commitment to open source lies only as far as
> > they are able to glean information from their users then you have to
> > figure their commitment isn't very substantial at all.
> > 
> > Craig
> > 
> >   
> For me it was when 'Trixbox Pro' came out that signaled it was time to
> move on to something else.  
> It was a sign that their vision didn't jibe with my needs; hosting
> things on their server it just felt wrong.
> I couldn't see why anyone would want to have a significant chunk of
> their pbx hosted somewhere on the internet - bad idea!
> I could see hosting the entire server on the internet as a service but
> not part of it.  
> 
> I agree with your assessment of Kerry's statements.
> Kerry was a pretty respected guy in the Asterisk community.  Now I'm
> not so sure.
> The big problem with TB is that it pretends to be an open source
> project.  
> Sure the source code is available but few people have the ability to
> contribute to the project.
> I hope other companies learn from Fonality's blunders; it really could
> have been win-win for them.
> 
> Im optimistic about PBX in a flash so far.
----
There are a LOT of open source projects that are driven by a commercial
entity and that doesn't necessarily make a project with both a
commercial version and community version bad...alfresco comes to mind
here but there are many, many others.

I seem to recall that asterisk itself was development driven by digium.
I don't necessarily say that all commercially driven open source
projects are problematic...only that the corporate whim factor seems to
play a heavy hand.

One of the biggest nightmares of corporate driven open source software
in my mind is Medsphere...
http://www.gplmedicine.org/articles_12/

What bothered me was that Kerry seemed to have already co-opted into the
thinking that the commercial interests were more important than
independence. He knew it was wrong but justified it anyway.

Craig