Hi Broken into paragraphs, so people can actually read. I will not address the content, as it has been rehashed ienough here and elsewhere.
Please read, e.g. http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html before posting anything in reply to this thread or anything similar. On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 08:12:07AM -0400, Federico Alves wrote: > Four years ago, I faced a real dilemma in my business: the Visual Voice PRI > dll had a bug that considered unanswered any call after ringing for 20 > seconds. This bug was in fact killing my business, because for international > calling, the setup of the call was already close to 20 seconds on many > cases. Furthermore, the vendor, Artisoft, had cowardly sold the software to > Dialogic, and Intel-Dialogic had killed the product. There was no support. > > I had to bite the bullet and buy a reverse-assembler (IDA-Pro), from a Belgium > company. I had to lock myself down in the lab for a week, until I understood > the location of exactly the right byte that was wrong, and replaced it at a > binary level for a 40 hex. Bingo. I made a living out of selling my pre-paid > platform for another two years, until I adapted Asterisk to replace Dialogic > and now I am paying my bills thanks to Asterisk. > > If I had not solved, my > existing clients would have looked elsewhere for a solution, and I had > failed to sell more switches. If Visual Voice had been open-source, I would > not had faced the terrible pressure to understand every single step of > assembler code required. So we need to reverse code and it surely is a > legitimate operation. > > Open source is far more convenient, but how do we > charge for the product? The business model is not there: the more popular > the product is, the more remote the possibility of the creator making any > money from it. > > Take Digium. The more experts on Asterisk pop-up, the less > demand is for Digium services. In fact, having tried Asterisk support from > Digium and others, I think the best Asterisk people --like Jeremy, Shido and > swk286-- are somewhere else. So the question is: how do we make sure that > the creator of the product makes even one dollar from every copy put in use > of his creation? The answer is: there is no answer. There is where Microsoft > wins. > > Additionally, Microsoft support services do know their products, and > if they fail to behave, they fix it. Digium made me once spend $150 and they > could not make res_odbc work, etc. I stopped using Digium support because > there is no way to know how many hours or dollars is going to take to fix > anything, while with others I pay for the result, not for the time. The > success is guaranteed. Regarding open-source-closed source, the future holds > a mixed-model in the store, and we are yet to discover it. -- Tzafrir Cohen | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | best ICQ# 16849755 | | friend _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
