Hello. I have downloaded and installed Asterisk Now. After installation, - there was a proposal in Administration console to pay 225, 525 or 1275 $.
Please answer me - why I should pay this money ? As I now - Asterisk is a free IP PBX, if I not pay - which restrictions will I have ? Can someone answer my questions as more in details as possible ?
If you run asterisk -x " core show license" you can read the Asterisk license
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program also contains components licensed under other licenses.
They include:
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Anyway i’m just curious, can you post an screenshare
Whilst it is probably true that hardly anyone here has used AsteriskNOW ( think you will find that people install an OS, then install Asterisk from source code), I’ve never heard mention this before. It could be that most people simply ignore it and don’t buy the upgrade.
If you are sure you downloaded AsteriskNOW from an untainted source, I could only suggest that this is a feature of FreePBX, the GUI that is included in AsteriskNOW, and which most AsterikNOW users install. That comes from a company called Sangoma, and will be added to AsterikNOW unchanged.
If such a sales pitch were contained in Asterisk, it is likely that a version would be quickly forked without that part of the code. On the other hand, most users of FreePBX and AsteriskNOW do so because they do not want to touch development tools, so I suppose it could be included in open source parts of those with little risk of a forked version removing it.
It’s also a lot more likely that an AsterikNOW user would not have the skills or time needed to find a free of charge console, or write one for themselves, so a sales pitch is more likely. However, I would still expect this to have come from FreePBX, not Asterisk, as Diigum don’t do a console for AsteriskNOW (they have their own commercialised versions of Asterisk, and I haven’t noticed any tendency to try to profit from commission on sales of third party products.
Note, though, that open source developers are not obliged to provide any particular level of function, so you may well have to buy software or write it yourself to create a complete system. In particular, I’m not aware of free of charge operator panel, other than a limited function loss leader version. I suppose it may be that that is making the sales pitch.
David551, i read your post, but did not understand:
- If i use Asterisknow, should i have to pay for it, or can use it for free ? If i use for free, will i experience some functionality limitations ?
- Based on your first paragraph - you mean that Asterisk now not so good made, as asterisk from installation distributive ?
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I’ve not used AsterisNOW, but for most of it, you do not need to pay anything. However it is quite possible that there are features that are only available if you pay for them, and an operator console may be one of them.
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Tools like AsteriskNOW are intended to allow people who have very standard requirements to get something working quickly, and with little deep understanding. People who spend a lot of time with Asterisk and understand it well enough to answer questions, generally don’t fall into that category.
It’s always possible that you haven’t downloaded AsterisNOW from the right place, and your version has had this sales pitch added