Dear all
I am going to have a rant at some of the points made in these posts.
1. GPL licensed software can be sold - any one of you can take the software and put it on a CD and sell it or on the Internet - as long as you supply the source code. And, you cannot stop anyone re-selling it themselves, even if they are re-selling what you sold them.
2. The "free" in the GPL license refers to the freedom to modify the code and view the code, not that the code is given to you free of charge - A2Billing choses not to charge for its' software.
3. You may modify the code - if you re-distribute the code (including selling it or giving it away), then you have to pass your modifications back into the open source - if you use it for your own use say as a Telecoms company, you can do pretty much what you like with it.
4. I know for a fact that contributions to this project are very very low and do not go far towards paying the hosting costs and certainly do not cover anywhere near the actual work that goes into this project.
5. The only notable source of income for this project is by doing consultancy for those who have a business idea, and do not want to spend time learning how to combine Asterisk, A2Billing, Apache, PHP, Linux, MySQL, possibly FreePBX and anyone knows what else, into a reliable working business class product for an order of magnitude less than what you pay commercially, and just want to get on with providing profitable services.
The main problem to providing an ISO is that this would remove a fairly large chunk of revenue that installation services and support provided by A2Billing gives, which I would personally doubt, would be replaced by donations, should an ISO be provided.
As product manager at Asterisk2Billing, I would like to spend money on advertising in the trade press, do trade shows, run training courses, demonstrations and generally raise the profile of A2Billing in the Telecoms industry, but there is no budget available, I too live hand to mouth based on PBX, A2Billing and telecoms / wireless consultancy. I know that many notables in the Telecoms industry would not know Asterisk if they found it eating their breakfast one morning, let alone A2Billing.
The last time I got a quote for a calling card platform from 2 well known companies in the UK, albeit 3 years ago, the cost for a billing platform with SIP capability was just over £60,000GBP providing 30 concurrent calls only, and I have no reason to suspect that this cost has changed markedly. Compare and contrast with the cost of a decent server, a Digium E1/T1 card, and a copy of Asterisk/A2billing.
Therefore, I implore you to use call-labs.com as your carrier, as profits from this service go back into A2Billing - If there are services that you want from call-labs, which are not supplied at present, then let us know and we will see what we can do.
Failing that, many of you you have must have contacts in the Telecoms and IT trade, make the introductions, and I will do the work to raise the profile of A2Billing.
For those of you that contribute code, your efforts are appreciated, and you know that a lot of your code is included.
For those of you that provide step by step guides, again, this is appreciated, but in addition to posting on your own website you'd be welcome to post them on the the Asterisk2Billing Wiki. In respect of providing an ISO, we have done as much as we dare by providing Trixbox installation instructions, coupled with a script.
Finally - if anyone can suggest a way of providing an ISO without impacting on the the Asterisk2Billiing reveue stream, such as it is, then we would be happy to hear from you, and be happy to provide the ISO.
Yours
Joe Roper
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