OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re: new hotness?)

[JD Austin]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Bryan O'Neal <boneal at cornerstonehome.com>wrote:

>  Thank you very much for the update on Asterisks! I have always had a soft
> spot for it and am exited that it is expanding into the market nicely :)  As
> for maintaining my servers, with cornerstone I was the director of IT but
> their was never a desire to higher another sysadmin so I spent almost 20% of
> my time "touching" my servers in some way. With my salary that is
> significantly more then $2K, however I never broke down how much was truly
> "development" that I just categorized as maintenance.  however, this
> includes regular system audits and other functions that would be performed
> no mater what the server OS.  When you say you don't spend $2K a year I have
> to ask, do you not maintain your servers or do you have some incredibly
> inexpensive sysadmin :)  At speekback.com I spent closer 10 60% of my time
> doing sysadmin work, but we were in the midst of a fast development curve.
> As for support they will continue doing critical support with regards to
> upgrades and patches for free even after the support contract expires,
> however if you just want some new funky module that does not effect you
> current base system (say you wanted the ability to upload your own custom
> rings onto your phone in mp3 format) you have to pay for it.  This really
> was something that came up after our contract expired.  As far as the
> support of Linux vs. Asterisks in house support it is just a matter of
> additional workload.  If you have follow resource it is not a real expense,
> however if you resources are already close to max, you must consider
> employing a new person to handle the additional workload...  Or pay your
> current people more, or run the risk of them getting burnt out.
>
> From what you say, I would say Asterisk cost has come way down and I am
> very happy :)
>
>  ------------------------------
>
Asterisk has come a long way since I started using it in late 2003.  Back
then it was in my opinion a neat toy.  Sure you COULD build great things
with it back then but it had too many issues at the time to put all your
eggs in that basket (the same as Linux was in 1995).  Each issue released
was a crapshoot.. some worked and some didn't.  It has attained very serious
momentum since then and changes so fast it's sometimes hard to keep up.  I
waited 3 years for it to get mature and stable enough to build a production
system with it.

Digium, the company driving the asterisk/zaptel/dahdi source, keeps changing
the API's for no good reason which breaks existing installations built on
it; they're 'upsetting' the developers.  Some time in the next few years I
believe FreeSwitch will over take Asterisk and be the telephony back end of
choice.  Some great projects like FreePBX (it used to be called Asterisk
Management Portal) have given Asterisk the stability it needed and made
building re-producable systems possible.  At the core of the most popular
Asterisk bundles is Linux+Asterisk+FreePBX.

I was attracted to Asterisk because it had almost everything I knew wrapped
into one thing and it just has the neato factor :)