To the contrary I have found Digiums support to be exceptional. They have helped support me with several minor and small problems, and all I did was buy hardware. In fact, when my soft switch was sending calling id and called id on my PRI out of spec, Matt was quick to write a patch to get me back up and running. This hardly fell in their realm of things they are required to support. If you receive support less then par the one person you are speaking to may be having a bad day. It's human nature and I have to work with my callcenter manager on this same problem with her employees. Ask to speak to someone else! I always try to find a specific person I like and I work well with in situations like this, and I never have another problem.
Once in 2003 when needing support for my new single port t1 span, Mark answered the support line. How cool is it that a company is so dedicated to support that when a CEOs technicians get busy, he helps on the phones.
I feel it is very important to have a Business Edition, and Digium is the only company with the ability to provide this within the letter of the law. MySQL does this very thing with a supported version of MySQL, it's called "MySQL Network." Even though MySQL has wanted in on the support front by providing a "Business Edition," they have continued their open source stable releases in a timely manner as well, I love 4.1.
So as far as digium being less likely to allow for new stable versions, I highly doubt it. The great thing is, you know, and everyone else knows that if Digium ceased supporting the open source version, the open source release would fork off in to other versions as long as we followed the existing open source license. Besides, for the most part CVS is managed by people that do not directly work with them, and stable releases are decided by mostly developers in the community.
Large companies enjoy the reassurance, and $995 is a very small capital expenditure for a 16 million dollar a year company (the company i work for) that wants to enjoy the reassurance of technical support. The closed source nature of it is here, nor there. If you want the source to CVS HEAD or STABLE, check it out. For them to *really* support a product *really* well they have to certify a product has X code, Y features, and works on Z hardware and you haven't added any odd random problems to the equation and nature of the business edition through patches you brewed.
Mark has always been quick to do the right thing for the community as well. In fact, talks of Asterisk 1.2 at Astricon have been rumoured, and I know we will continue to get a very great and valuable stable branch.. This is a symbiotic relationship. Digium and all of you great developers provide an excellent tree of Asterisk. The community enjoys the best most flexible PBX ever-to-date, and Digium makes money, saves our companies money, and provide an outlet to make an exponential amount of money in the VoIP arena... I have a feeling digium is not interested in breaking this wonderful symbiotic relationship by burning its customers.
So I prefer to feed my Digium friends who work the oddest long hard hours bringing us very cool products, and get a little extra added support. If you disagree, check out a copy of CVS/HEAD or CVS/STABLE, and get community support from the mailing lists =)
Your friend,
Brian McManus
On 7/18/05, Kevin Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
KRTorio [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> For $995+ (including support), a technical manual, and scripts, is it
> worth switching to the business edition?
>
Absolutely not. If you find that you need $995 worth of support, some
time in the future, then I'm sure that you can obtain it from one of
several providers. I don't think it's worth paying up-front for
something you probably won't need, but that's really for you to decide.
If you really want to pay $995 for a closed source product with "some
features removed and license control added," then go for it. It's
your money.
--
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_/_/_/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ K e v i n W a l s h
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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