Can anybody tell what teh actual benefits are of getting a commercial version of Asterisk over an in house developed version?
You help digium stay in business but at the cost that many of the open source tools and libraries are not tested/developed against the Business Edition as they don’t offer it for free 
Hi
Flexability, IE you get what you want.
Have a look at rpath its basicly Asterisk Business edition. and is very stable and will give you a good base to work from.
Ian
what they said…
one thing, though, if you find yourself constantly applying patches and whatnot - digium will NOT be able to provide you with patches to implement new features or fix existing bugs - BE is a much more mature product, so it runs about a year or so behind the open-source verion in terms of features and bugfixes. for the most part, this is OK, but there are times (and i’m going through one right now) when you’ll want to go back to the open-source edition because there is ONE thing you need and cannot get.
otherwise, BE feels faster and more streamlined than the OS edition, but that might just be me.