While I can definitely relate with Anthony Minessale having to pay the bills, I am skeptical of Baracuda and their intent. A different product comes to mind (green), which gained commercial backing and soon began a downward spiral into worthlessness while crucial decisions bounced back and forth as to whether to give key development to the commercial offering, or the free open source offering. Other questions come to mind, PR representatives from Baracuda have said they will not be announcing their stance on the project until some time depending on several factors. What are they waiting for? What might change their stance on the product - ie "how high public demand is" - if lots of people want it, then so does Baracuda? Why have they decided to jump into the voice arena?, of which they have not even remote past experience.
It worries me greatly, as Freeswitch was going to be my replacement for Asterisk, which seems to be a great product, but at times decisions dont seem to be made with the project's best interest in mind (asterisk that is). Freeswitch gets its roots from Asterisk, but its goal is more openness, better compatibility with 3rd party components, and more logical programming logic (duh - or it wouldnt be logic;).
Anyways I had been keeping my eyes open on Freeswitch, awaiting its maturity, but now I keep a skeptical eye on it, awaiting political redirections.
UPDATE: July 5
As so kindly noted by Brian West in the comments, in this interview with Kerry Garrison, Anthony Minessale has cleared up any doubts posed by Baracuda's failure to answer key questions.
As for other questions readers might have about freeswitch and its roots, you might start by reading how it started at this site.
If you follow up on the story where Kerry interviews Anthony you'll see you have nothing to worry about.
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Here is the post... remember FreeSWITCH was NOT bought.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.voipstore.com/2009/06/interview-with-anthony-minessale-from-freeswitch/
"at times decisions don't seem to be made with the project's best interests in mind"
ReplyDeleteCould you elaborate on exactly what decisions? Or are you just posting something that you "heard" from someone else somewhere on the web? That seems to be something that a lot of people have started doing lately :-|
"Freeswitch gets its roots from Asterisk"
Could you please define "gets its roots from"? FreeSWITCH (btw, that's the proper capitalization ;-)) doesn't share any of Assterisk's code. The closest it comes to "getting roots from" Asterisk, is that several of the developers used to work on asterisk.
Well hello gentlemen, thank you for gracing my lowly blog. Let me just clarify for some readers, as my statements are a bit generalized. Had Baracuda not avoided a direct question posed by Tony Lewis as to their aime (correct old english spelling), speculation such as mine would not arise.
ReplyDelete"at times decisions don't seem to be made with the project's best interests in mind" - this is a generalized remark aimed at asterisk not freeswitch (sorry, I am not advertising it so I am in no way required to honor trademarks, proper grammar, spelling or even english ;- just a jab). A shame I had not seen Kerrys interview with Anthony before posting this article (Kerry had hands in a similar situation in the past), but regardless I will still keep a watchful eye on Baracuda (i believe its 2 r's, but who's counting), it is bad form to avoid questions that are obvious to be publicized, normally big businesses do things like this to avoid answering questions they dont like - whats not to like Anthony is getting paid (I cant down a man for feeding his family) and FreeSwitch is still owned by Anthony and the FOSS community - right??
While nothing in freeSWITCH has any close resemblance to Asterisk, it was definitely inspired by asterisk in Anthony's desire to create a better mouse-trap, as there are there several dis-tasteful patterns that Digium continues to force upon us in their releases of Asterisk.
FYI for those that didnt know - Brian West is a past developer of Asterisk, and is in charge of Public Relations and Administration of FreeSWITCH, luckily he expressed the important thing here - Freeswitch was not bought.
thanks for stopping by guys - cheers!
What are they waiting for? What might change their stance on the product - ie "how high public demand is" - if lots of people want it, then so does Baracuda? Why have they decided to jump into the voice arena?, of which they have not even remote past experience.
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