isen.blog

Benjamin Kowarsch [benjamin at sunrise-tel dot com] writes from Japan:

I remember you made a statement in one of your articles [my two published articles on this are here and here -- David I] that Asterisk's problem was being tied to a single vendor's hardware.

I pointed out that there are drivers for other vendors' hardware, such as Dialogic, Voicetronix and a variety of BRI ISDN cards from various vendors.

However, it turns out that Digium's hardware isn't really Digium's proprietary hardware at all. The Zapata Telephony boards are open source designs, released under the GPL by Jim Dixon, an idealistic telecom guru who is not affiliated with Digium in any way.

What this means is that anybody can download the CAD files and instructions from this site and make their own Zapata telephony cards, either for their own use, or sell them for profit.

This is what Digium did. And there are other companies who do the same, for example Varion.

To be fair though, there are two products which are solely Digium's own design from the ground up: the TDM400 analog board and the IAXy analog telephone adapter.

Meanwhile the Farfon IAX IP phone is available for ordering (shipping mid October) and the Farfon IAX ATA will be in direct competition with Digium's IAXy.

I think it would only be fair to the Asterisk community if you posted something to the effect that there is no such thing as a dependency on Digium, whatsoever since both the software and the hardware are GPL and there are other companies making hardware for Asterisk and IAX.

I am pleased and amused to learn that Digium products are largely founded on open source hardware and software -- another feather in the cap for IAX and Asterisk. Thanks, Benjamin.

Recently I thought about SIP vs IAX when I was in a meeting where somebody broached the idea that XML itself was unnecessarily complicated and cumbersome. Borrowing from Einstein, software should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.