danny April 25th, 2008

Welcome to the second episode of Asterisk Myth Busters. In this installment, we’ll investigate a common misconception regarding the Asterisk contributors’ license agreement.

MYTH: Digium requires code contributors to give away their rights.

Contributors to any open source, GPL-licensed project willingly grant specific rights, while maintaining copyright on their contribution. Digium, as the sponsor of the Asterisk, has required from the inception of the project that contributors to Asterisk sign the contributors’ license agreement – a policy that is designed to ensure that Asterisk remains free of legal encumbrances. The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. While the Asterisk contributor’s license agreement does enable commercial licensing, all code contributed under this license agreement is available freely under the GPL. Digium’s commercial license revenues directly fund continued open source development. This is truly a dual licensing model, in which the use of one license does not diminish the other.

While there are those that take exception to this policy, there are precedents among other very successful open source projects that are in line with the Digium policy. For example, the Apache Software Foundation requires a signed Contributor License Agreement to be on file before an individual is given commit rights to an ASF project ( http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt ). There are also precedents with more strident legal requirements such as the Free Software Foundation’s policy which requires copyright assignment or disclaimer to accept GNU contributions ( http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legal-Matters ). Digium is not blazing a new trail here, just working to apply best practices to the Asterisk project.

OUTCOME: Busted. Contributors keep their copyrights

• ABE , Community , Digium , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source
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danny April 15th, 2008

Here at Digium, we’re big fans of the Discovery channel’s hit series, MythBusters, and its dynamic duo of co hosts, Adam & Jamie. On any given day at Digium you can overhear geeks discussing a favorite myth or the latest episode. “Plane on a conveyor belt” lasted for weeks, and will still spark up a heated discussion if you troll it past the right people.

Since joining Digium I’ve read or come face-to-face with a number misunderstandings regarding open source. Some are very general in nature while some are related specifically to Asterisk or Digium’s role in the Asterisk project ( example http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25408 ). Given that Asterisk and open source in general is now expanding into a user base beyond that of the open source early adopters, it seems as though it would be fun to explore some of these myths in the same form as the MythBusters, and along the way explain Digium’s philosophy on Asterisk and our role in the ecosystem. So, we’re kicking off what hopefully will become our own little series of MythBusters with this post. Unfortunately, there are no explosions involved in busting these myths, so they’re not likely to be included in any of the upcoming episodes of the real TV show.

MYTH: Open Source means free software (as in beer)

Many are surprised to learn that open source software is actually distributed under a license agreement. Open source software is computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner.

In order to qualify as open source according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, a software license must meet the following 10 requirements;

1. Free Redistribution: the software can be freely given away or sold. (This was intended to encourage sharing and use of the software on a legal basis.)
2. Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable. (Without source code, making changes or modifications can be impossible.)
3. Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed. (To allow legal sharing and to permit new features or repairs.)
4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code: licenses may require that modifications are redistributed only as patches.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: no one can be locked out.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: commercial users cannot be excluded.
7. Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: the program cannot be licensed only as part of a larger distribution.
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software: the license cannot insist that any other software it is distributed with must also be open source.
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral: no click-wrap licenses or other medium-specific ways of accepting the license must be required.

So, right off the bat we dispel the myth that Open Source software has to be free (as in beer) but is actually free (as in speech). In the case of Asterisk, there is now and will always be a version of the code that is open source and can be downloaded for free (as in beer). However, Digium does license the code under two distinct and separate license agreements. The first is the GNU Public License version 2 (GPL v2). The second is a Digium Commercial End User License Agreement. This ‘dual licensing’ model is is utilized by a number of open source companies. More about that in a future episode.

OUTCOME: Busted. Open Source software is free (as in speech), and may be free (as in beer), but does not have to be free (as in beer) in order to be free (as in speech).

• ABE , Digium , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source
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beelinebill March 21st, 2008

Digium was active this week at both Digium Asterisk World (DAW) in San Jose and VoiceCon in Orlando. It was a very successful week for us all here at Digium and the results of both events clearly indicated continued growth and interest in Asterisk, Asterisk market success, and Digium and partner product offerings!

Tuesday was a news-filled day for Digium http://www.digium.com/en/mediacenter/. Digium Asterisk World kicked off at VON.x in San Jose with Mark Spencer’s Keynote address at Digium Asterisk World. Danny Windham, our CEO, did a VON.x keynote - An Open Source VoIP Primer - to a full room of enterprise users, potential Asterisk adopters, and open source Asterisk interested parties.

Numerous other Digium folks presented at DAW including Jared Smith, Steve Sokol and Brian Degenhardt. VoiceCon in Orlando on the opposite coast ran with talks by both Mark Spencer and Bill Miller on Thursday.

There were three announcements that are exciting to Digium and they include A global Distribution partnership with Westcon to distribute the entire line of Digium products. Westcon’s new CollaborationPoint line of business is focused on open source solutions including Digium’s Switchvox IP PBX (http://www.digium.com/switchvox), the Asterisk Appliance (http://www.digium.com/en/products/appliance/), and Asterisk Developer Solutions and toolkits including all Digium’s telephony cards and Asterisk Business Edition (http://www.digium.com/en/products/).

Tuesday Digium announced the Switchvox SMB 3.5 release, the new version of the award winning SMB software that already includes the Switchboard user panels with built in Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Google Maps web-based interface panels. These built in tools allow users to build outstanding customer and support relations with their target customers. New features include multi-level administration - unlimited levels, built in Phone Configuration tools which are great for resellers and larger systems allowing provisioning of Polycom phones in minutes using batch tools for DID assignments and caller IDs, and adding of extensions, and the ability to easily find users in the directory by simply typing the name and similar to your cell phones locates the name directly in as few keystrokes as possible. Also, the SMB 3.5 software automatically populates the users desktop Polycom phone directory with contact info from the Switchvox address book - a time saving tool and excellent user experience.

Digium’s newest appliance, the Switchvox Appliance AA60 was also announced Tuesday and will be available with Switchvox SMB 3.5 software on March 31. The AA60 is a small footprint wall mountable package that offers higher reliability and lower costs and includes a standard 1 year warranty and an extended warranty option for 3 years.

Lastly, Digium announced our call for second annual “Innovation Award” entries http://www.digium.com/en/company/awards/. In 2007, we had an overwhelming response and for 2008, we have invited an outside community judge - more later on this person. Winners will be announced at Astricon in Phoenix in September and be invited to speak about their winning innovations at DAW in October in Boston. This is a great PR opportunity for those involved!

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I was at VoiceCon. I can share with you some of the event happenings. Digium’s booth was busy from start to finish full with enterprise users, resellers from major IP Telephony vendors who want to add Digium’s products to their offerings, and partners. Tristan, Randy and Gayle were overwhelmed giving demos, answering questions and setting up follow-on meetings. I was busy with three and a half days of press and analyst meetings. Mark Spencer flew to Orlando to participate in the “VoiceCon Summit: Software Architectures for Unified Communications” featuring Digium, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Mitel, and moderated by Fred Knight (Jitter.com Publisher and VoiceCon co-chair) and Jim Burton (UC Strategies). I did a panel with 3Com and Nortel on “Open Source in the Enterprise: How much and how soon?”

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Digium Asterisk World reports came back that Mark’s keynote (Why Digium Asterisk World?) and Danny’s keynote (An Open Source VoIP Primer) were well received and well attended. Digium had several other speakers: Brian Degenhardt spoke on the impact of next generation web technology on open source telephony applications, Steve Sokol on flexible platforms that enable voice applications, and Jared Smith did an introduction to Asterisk - all in the Open Source DAW track where all sessions were well attended. John Todd was the guest moderator and feedback was he did an excellent job - Digium and Pulvermedia thank John for his efforts making the overall program a success!

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We are hoping that overlapping events like this week never happen again! Please Pulvermedia and VoiceCon….no more concurrent dates!

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One last item that was my “you can’t make this stuff up moment”:

As VoiceCon was ending there was a chearleading event moving into the Gaylord Palms (a terrific venue by the way if you’ve never been there). The final day sessions of the conference were running as the convention committee placed placards in each rest room - Men’s AND Women’s! Now, why is the “AND” capitalized? Check this out:

• ABE , Asterisk Awards , AsteriskNOW , Channel , Digium Asterisk World , Open Source , Partners , Products , Switchvox , Tradeshows , VoiceCon
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beelinebill March 7th, 2008

I have seen this type of blog or article before, but thought I would do my version today which will clearly be different. Sharing one person’s view of Asterisk its community and its evolution, we shall explore through these 10 data points!

10. An entire new industry was formed when Mark Spencer released Asterisk software into open source under the GPL license in 1999.

9. A passionate Community was built to harness the power of Asterisk over the next several years culminating today in the largest open source IP telephony community.

8. www.asterisk.org became the resource for developers to meet each other, share coding and implementation and war stories; there are many mailing lists and forums to communicate with others.

7. Digium started making and shipping TDM gateway cards to enable commercial growth in the 4th quarter of 2001. This enabled businesses around the globe to start building hybrid TDM-VoIP IP PBXs at very low costs

6. Third parties started to develop GUIs for Asterisk in the mid-2000s to build specific targeted products based on Asterisk. The GUIs were proprietary on top of Asterisk to configure it more easily. The Linux/Asterisk techies still prefer command line but less technical Linux folks like the evolution of the newer GUIs. Digium loved the Switchvox GUI and acquired the company. Switchvox is the best CPE-based business phone system on the planet! The advanced features include built in presence, queue management, call recording, easy to use and literally dozens of other phone features.

5. One GUI, FreePBX, along with Asterisk that became the basis for a distribution called trixbox, a distribution found from time to time. Digium created its own AsteriskNOW to simplify a distribution for non-technical users and open sourced the AsteriskGUI from this distribution.

4. Digium’s TDM gateway cards for PCI grew to over 3M ports shipped and others entered the exciting fast growing market. To clone your products is the sincerest form of flattery. Some clone totally and some build slightly different products to solve the same problem.

3. An entire “ecosystem” grew to enable the Asterisk world. Sokol and Associates built Asterisk training and the Astricon user/developer conference; Digium loved this and acquired the company; consulting companies started with those who were tired of the proprietary company way; O’Reilly published the Asterisk book followed by others; Digium former partner programs and encourages ecosystem to grow to offer more complete and custom solutions for resellers and users alike.

2. Mark Spencer, the author, visionary of open source Asterisk, CTO and Chairman of Digium is requested to speak around the world about Asterisk which he does as much as his schedule allows - especially for community related events and long term relationships that he has established.

1. Asterisk has begun moving mainstream with hundreds of companies building Asterisk-based products. Some are built on open source. Some on Asterisk Business Edition. Some are complete appliances, some are VoIP services including SIP and IAX trunking. Some are hosted and hybrid hosted solutions. Some are success, others are not - just like any business. The business model is evolving. VCs are interested in some of these companies as strong investments. Companies like 3Com and NTT who have been in the voice business a long time have commercialized Asterisk offerings built around Asterisk Business edition.

In Summary, Digium is growing up. A Seasoned executive team; Digium Asterisk World and Astricon Conferences in partnership with Pulvermedia who helps manage and market the events; Commercial offerings that are second to none: Switchvox is the most powerful easiest to use CPE-based SMB offering today, with exceptional Business telephony features, including unified communications offerings traditional proprietary do not have yet; the AA50 Appliance for small unsophisticated offices and branch offices; PCI and PCI Express Gateway card business; A loyal and growing community of developers, partners such as Polycom and Lumenvox and many others, and channels; An interesting mix of open source commitment to the world of developers and user groups and commercial business building. It is fun, intense, highly competitive, eye opening, high visibility in the press and with analysts, and just coming to the office every day is exciting.

• ABE , AsteriskNOW , AstriCon , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source , Products , Switchvox
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beelinebill February 11th, 2008

Digium is putting our money where our mouth is. We are investing in total quality programs throughout the company - and today we are rolling out the new Digium Exceptional Satisfaction Program (ESP).

ESP includes:

• Quality hardware products with “Stand behind the product” warranties.
• Money back satisfaction guarantee.
• Courteous and helpful service agents.

The quality mantra starts with our customers and extends to every aspect of our products and customer service. Our goal is to produce the highest quality hardware and software and to deliver the highest quality business solutions, training and support to totally satisfy our customers. Over the past year, we have re-architected nearly the entire range of PCI Telephony interface and gateway cards and introduced a wide range of PCI Express cards. We have listened to the community and our customers and now offer an echo-free guarantee. We have refined the drivers and increased performance for these cards.

Effective immediately, on all current Digium cards we have set the PCI and PCI Express Card warranty at FIVE YEARS and offer a no-risk guarantee to our customers. (See our End of Life announcements for discontinued products.) We have improved our pricing on a number of products - and redesigned our channel programs to benefit those organizations that truly partner with Digium.

Digium PCI and PCI Express cards are the best value in the market. If the cards do not work with Genuine Asterisk as advertised, our top notch technical support team will work with you to resolve the problem. If the problem can not be successfully resolved, we will refund your money. Yes, you heard it. We have always done this, but now we are promoting it and will continue to. Digium’s Hardware Appliances offer standard 1 year warranty that can be extended by renewing the subscription on your product.

100% Customer Satisfaction. Make no mistake - Digium is dead serious. As benevolent sponsor and maintainer of the open source Asterisk project, Mark Spencer’s dream has forever altered the world of communications.

- - - - - - -

What do our customers say? Here is an excerpt from one of the open source Asterisk mailing lists, one person responding to another:

I have been using 220B’s for about 6 months. I have about 20 of them out in the field. I have not had any issues with them, and feedback is positive.

Same here. I’ve been using five TE220B in my company at 5 different sites since october 2007; up to now, zero problems and no echo at all. One of the sites runs a small callcenter that handles about 1000 incoming calls per day. So far the feedback is really positive. Alberto.

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I have launched many programs over the years, and while we’ve been planning this program and launch I have received more exciting employee feedback than ever before. The hallways, coffee pot, conference rooms, and parking lot discussions are about the excitement of proving to the world that open source telephony solutions are ready for the mainstream and so is Digium! We are proud of our “Mark Spencer” heritage as the author and creator of Asterisk as well as today’s major sponsor and community steward. We have the worlds best IP PBX in Asterisk, according to Infoworld, who awarded us the “Best IP PBX” award last month to kick off 2008. World class service and people along with the best open source based IP Telephony products on the planet.

Customer Focus! Quality Products! 100% Customer Satisfaction!

Visit www.digium.com for all the details.

We look forward to serving you!

• ABE , AsteriskNOW , Community , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source , Products , Quality
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