Hey Folks,

What a great conversation, really enjoyed all the insight and feedback, other than what's already been said, which I agree with whole heartedly, I want to add some personal reflection.

FOSS is exceptional for putting tools in your hands to build what your business can use to succeed. You will spend upfront $$ investment with man-hours learning, deploying, managing then cost trails off to realize the return on investment which is usually exponential compared to commercial drop-in voice switches. A key consideration is expected/targeted growth of the solution and operational expediency, how big with the subscriber base get, voice service is a high touch point for customer support. Once you (as in personally) deploy a FOSS solution in production, you are tied to that solution for its foreseeable existence, good luck finding competent and like-minded staff that see your vision and can support the solution as you do. Deployment guys will always have a deeper understanding/knowledge of the solution, architecture, configuration, pitfalls and work around than the operations support folks. If you don't have staff resources, having consultants you can rely on is crucial for success.

I can't say enough about Kamailio for building call routing solutions, mature, stable, reliable, continued improvements, phenomenal developer and community base for support.

Good luck whichever direction you go in!

JR Richardson

On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:25 PM, Alex Balashov abalashov@evaristesys.com wrote:

Medium to large organisations, in particular, tend to extract labour from consistent (if unextraordinary) output of everyday do-gooders, and not the more stochastic and volatile heroics of open-source superstars.

Sorry, I meant to say "extract value" here, not "extract labour".

But the larger point is that any successful formula heavily reliant on open-source is going to be a lot more dependent on culture, and on the strengths of individual people and their specific skills, than a formula reliant on a third-party vendor, all other things being equal.

-- Alex