And why is this unnecessary cruft included in the source tree? So that Digium can leverage the Free Software
community into developing proprietary software for them.
Am I way off the mark?
I think you're unfairly impugning Digium's motives. And I also think you're--again--salting your post with enough innuendo that a reasonable person might suspect you of flame-baiting.
I suscribe to the mailing lists of several OS VoIP solutions, as I'm sure do many others on this list. There is nothing out there like asterisk, in terms of it functionality, or the body of minds that have collected to work on it. I have recently found myself embarking on a mini-career doing fundamental-level VoIP training to network operators, technology freaks, and even some small-telco tech people. I take along a laptop with asterisk on it and do a little song-and-dance that shows off some of its gee-whiz features.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that almost always people's mouths drop open in amazement at what all that asterisk can do. It's comical sometimes how affected people are.
So I have all this functionality, and I have all the source code to it, and I can legally keep it forever at this (mostly happy) level of functionality, and if Digium drops off the face of the earth, I can start with what's there ("we can start with what's there"; I know I won't be alone) and keep going should that happen.
So I can look at the same set of facts that you do, but in my mind Digium is not the nefarious would-be crook that you imply in your postings, but rather a brilliant and disruptive force upon the telco world. And they are a *business,* and as many of the people reading this sentence are bound to know, one trick of the Open Source world is to figure out how to keep things open and free and at the same time how to keep bread on the table and enough cashflow to keep up with the technology (VoIP in this case) Joneses.
I cannot guess your motives, but I'm pretty sure that I *do* know what Digium's motives are, and they are innocuous and altruistic instead of the way you portray them.
Where are you trying to take this?
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