VoIP Mailing List Archives

[Dean at cognation.net]

Hi BJ,
Further explanation about the 3rd party ecosystem question this morning

Cory Andrews from VoIP supply was on the Voip-Users conference call last
week.

I asked the question - how much of VoIP Supply revenue is product versus
applications - he said we don't sell any services such as ITSP hosted
Asterisk so I replied that wasn't what I was thinking of and gave the
example of Snap Dialer which is a low cost (I think I paid $20 for it)
application which allows me to dial names from outlook.

I then talked about some of the consulting I did for Salesforce.com and
how they have built an entire ecosystem of third party applications all
built by other people but utilizing the documented API's and application
security etc.

My comments were that although Asterisk should always remain a free open
source application that developers need to eat and pay rent as well.

If there was some common marketplace that developers could sell small -
low cost third party applications to the Asterisk community that Digium
had some type of overview/management control over who listed etc that
this would deliver a stream of revenue that would encourage further
application development.

The question I then posed to the group was if anyone knew how Digium
managed the sale and licensing of the G729 codes.

And if this was an open published standard that it could be used as the
basis for the Asterisk ecosystem license model.

Now I know it's not perfect and can be hacked but everything can be
hacked. The idea is to build apps cheap enough that it's not worth the
effort of hacking.

I know there were discussions in Mexuar about how we could sell (read
license) a single channel of the Mexuar Corraleta application rather
than the entire server license for $2000.

Earlier this week I sent an original email to Digium and told Kevin was
responsible for the G729 licenses so I was hoping that this Friday we
could get Kevin and possibly the developers of Snap Dialer to talk about
their current license models and how they implemented payment systems
and also maybe the developer of FOP to discuss if this was available to
him and he was able to sell a 100 licenses or something like that a
month would this provide an income stream to support further development
etc.

Does this make sense?
Does anyone have any comments or would you like to be involved with
Fridays call?




Regards,

Dean Collins
Cognation Pty Ltd
dean@cognation.net
+1-212-203-4357 Ph
+61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial).