Hi Matt,
Thanks for posting this. I disagree with Gordon about the website, it looks okay...
I haven't played much with VOIP (Rob does all the heavy lifting for us) but after trying self-hosting for a while, we did have some ongoing problems with quality and when lightning took out the POTS cards, we moved to Gordon's system and from there, onto another remote hoster (Soho66) for our business needs. That works well, is very configurable, and once we've cancelled most of our pots lines, we'll be saving a lot of money. Â
My reason for replying is more about the model of this software rather than the software itself.Â
Elastix seems to follow the "Free product, with expensive paid-for plugins and support" Âmodel that has gained a lot of ground over the last decade. This is one I have dabbled with with other packages and, well, it's not a model I like a great deal. Â(Just clicking on three random plugins showed one that costs $12,700)
The temptation is always there for the developers, when they add a new feature, is to put it in the "For paying customers only" release. I've watched several products using this model over the years and the usefulness gap between the original open source & Free product and the (sometimes several) premium products alwaysÂincreases as development continues to the point where a mature product has an effectively crippled free product, but the premium one isn't quiteÂas good as the purely commercial versions (which might have time or user limited trials)
Of all the software models, I think this one is the hardest to keep balanced as a project develops.
For self-hosted voip, unless you know you have all the features forever in the base project, I'd be quite nervous of committing to such a relationship when functionality I need might be split into a plugin costing many thousands of dollars because the developers want more money (for development, hosting costs or a shiny new sports car)
S
