Archive for the 'AsteriskNOW' Category

Digium Trademarks

beelinebill January 17th, 2008

In response to an increase in the occurrence of unauthorized use of Digium trademarked terms, we have recently expanded our efforts to control the use of Digium’s trademarks. One of the measures taken has been to work within Google’s defined programs to control the purchase of Digium trademarked terms as Google Adwords.

In doing so we proactively provided Google with a list of companies that have signed agreements with Digium permitting the use of Digium trademarks. Google will continue to allow organizations on that list to purchase Digium trademarked terms as Google Adwords.

If, however, your organization has been contacted by Google and required to stop using the Digium marks, you may contact Digium directly to request that your company be added to the list of authorized organizations.

For those organizations that are resellers and partners, that are not formally Digium authorized, we invite you to become a reseller or technology partner. To do so please visit http://www.digium.com/en/ecosystem/ and click through to your selected type of partnership.

If the formal Digium programs don’t fit your situation, you may send a request to the trademarks@digium.com email address with some history of your past use and the specifics of your request for the future. Additionally, Digium routinely grants trademark rights to organizations seeking to use the marks for non-commercial uses in support of the Asterisk community. Once again, please submit requests of this nature to trademarks@digium.com.

The complete Digium trademark policy can be viewed at http://www.digium.com/en/company/view-policy/5. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and will work to turn around all requests within 24-48 business hours.

Thank you for your interest in Digium!

Giving and Taking

markster December 25th, 2007

First of all, I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas (well at least to those who celebrate it and/or appreciate the sentiment)! It’s a day when many people, myself included, put an especially significant thought into giving. What many people do during Christmas is give gifts (perhaps in recognition the gift that many Christians celebrate receiving 2000+ years ago).

In the early days of Asterisk, when I went to conferences and sat on stage with folks from Cisco and Avaya and other big telecom vendors, they tended to look at Digium like a charity, and Asterisk as purely a gift. However, it’s important to note that while in some sense, Asterisk is a gift, it is also a gift that has some special meaning and responsibilities associated with it (perhaps more like an engagement ring). In particular, Asterisk is licensed under GPL, which allows a wide variety of free use, but also requires that distribution be done in a similarly gift-like method.

Occasionally, however, I have heard people complain that the Digium GPL license is somehow not a real GPL license, since Digium also offers Asterisk under a commercial license.

This no more makes Asterisk “less GPL” than it makes a gift less valuable just because it’s given to someone else as well. There is nothing about dual licensing that in anyway takes away from what is given under GPL. Furthermore, if the concern is that people can create commercial derivative works without releasing the code of their changes, do those same people who complain also object to the GNU C Library which is released under LGPL? Do they also complain about the Apache web server, which is released under an even less restrictive license? X-Windows? Almost all of BSD? All these systems allow commercial exploitation. The dual licensing model that Digium has chosen introduces an explicit monetary cost to choosing the proprietary route, thus providing greater direct incentive to people to choose to open their changes, and further allowing people who do not choose to open their changes to subsidize the work that Digium does with Asterisk by allowing us to add more open source resources (think Green Energy Credits here). In fact, our staff of open source dedicated programmers has more than doubled in 2007 alone!

The only people with a real reason to be upset feel that way because they cannot choose the proprietary route without paying a fee. In other words, it gets in the way of their desire to make money through proprietary add-ons without having to share in the cost of development of the underlying technology.

I have so many things to be thankful for this Christmas, but among the top of the list is the gift of so many contributers and customers who allow me to continue to give through my work at Digium.

Genuine Asterisk

beelinebill December 22nd, 2007

The past few days demonstrate the risk associated with people using “non-Genuine Asterisk” products. Open Source can be a wide reaching tool but when it’s not supported by the right reputable company, there can be risk associated it. The concept of “phoning home” was dissected by forum members and slashdot over the past few days. The topic is deeper than a pure phone home to Fonality issue and is far reaching to many users. We agree with the concept of opt-in/opt-out; our open source Asterisk is totally free and AsteriskNOW free with optional opt-in registration. These Genuine Asterisk open source products from Digium do not have phone home tricks. If you care to read for yourself, here are a couple of links:

Linux-Based Phone System Phones Home
Just Say No: Hidden BOTs and Asterisk Don’t Mix

Randy Resnick’s VoIP Uses Conference on Talkshoe (www.talkshoe.com) today also had a pretty good open conference about the details of what occurred and Fonality/trixbox’s response (Voip Users Live Conference/Podcast).

There were questions about funding for open source projects, opt-in and opt-out concepts, lots of talk about monetization of open source projects, people asked about Digium developing internal monitoring tools so all the usage details can be accumulated from all Asterisk versions if its in core code. We’d like to hear your input and ideas there. We do not have any projects that address this concept as we are sticking with open source as “open” and not requiring data collection from the user. Our Commercial business allows us track users from subscription registrations. Let us know what you think about this very sensitive topic!

Change is in the Air

beelinebill September 27th, 2007

Today Digium announces that Switchvox has become part of the Digium family. This is a group of talented people whose mission in life is to change the world by making things that simply work. In their past lives, the founders developed small systems that were self-contained and each time they progressively improved their vision. With their Switchvox IP PBX technology to deliver VoIP and hybrid solutions to small and medium businesses, they accomplished just that. Their asterisk-based IP PBX software simply works. It’s GUI is second to none to run an office phone system. It’s Web 2.0 Mashups are simply elegant, informational, and cool. The people are terrific and they are welcomed into Digium.

Today at Astricon will be an event of large proportion in the Asterisk open source community. For the first time, we will unveil the Digium Switchvox software in our booth. Users will see this simplicity, already installed and used in some 1400 installations with over 65,000 connected IP and analog phones. The personalities of the creators of this user-friendly software based on Asterisk are integrated into this offering and each release becomes easier to use for more people and businesses - driving Asterisk-based solutions into the mass market.

Digium and Switchvox executives will talk to attendees and community members today and answer any questions as best we can on the first day of an announcement. More details will be unveiled over the coming months. Some Bloggers who were briefed have already posted their first stories. Some posters are much more professional than others. I’ve seen the initial posts from people who were briefed earlier in the day and people who were in the right place at the right time at Astricon later last night after the Digium-Switchvox team had a joint signing celebration. Like software based on Asterisk, the blogs vary from easy on the eyes to read and understand to not so easy to understand or even comprehend what angle the writer was trying to take. Switchvox software based on Asterisk is clearly superior and easily accomplishes the workhorse tasks of a phone system in easy to read and understand graphical formats integrated with the web.

Other Asterisk-based software has lots of stuff and can do lots of what Asterisk can do, which is “immense” as described last night but is not elegantly presented or easy to use.

So read the blogs and the articles. After days of briefing press and analysts, you will read upcoming articles that you personally can compare, to describe the writer’s personal felt impact of what Digium’s acquisition of Switchvox will have on the Asterisk Community, Switchvox customers and partners, and Digium’s customers and partners. You decide which writers are bizarre, which writers are aligned with competitors, which writers “get it” and which writers are aligned with Digium’s and Switchvox’s vision.

The open source community will gain from Digium’s move. Elements of Switchvox’s solution will be contributed back to the community over time. Digium’s success is always shared with the community by continued and increased investments in open source resources and events such as Astricon and Digium Asterisk World where users and prospects meet and learn more about how to use Asterisk, how to market Asterisk-based products, how to build dial plans that can turn the tables on a telemarketer, and on and on. Customers and prospects learn about more open source based choices.

Danny and Josh, the two respective CEOs will publish their thoughts here shortly, I am prefacing their post by telling you, “Woo hoo!!!!!!!!!” Get ready to Rock and Roll with Digium and Switchvox. When “best of breeds” get together, the results are “best of the best” so join us for the ride!

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