<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Jun 26, 2007, at 3:35 PM, Dean Collins wrote:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><O:SMARTTAGTYPE namespaceuri="schemas-snapanumber-com/snap" name="dial" downloadurl="http://www.snapanumber.com"><O:SMARTTAGTYPE namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PersonName"><DIV class="Section1"><P class="MsoPlainText"><FONT size="2" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt">When you consider the massive 'ecosystem' of users/partners and developers that the Asterisk open source community has built up around itself MythTV is actually doing pretty poorly (considering they both started off around the same time).</SPAN></FONT></P></DIV></O:SMARTTAGTYPE></O:SMARTTAGTYPE></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Actually, that's an interesting point, because it's partly a *result* of the Zap2It Labs situation. Think about it. A lot of the community development in Asterisk has happened because companies creating commercial products with it needed some new piece of functionality, and were willing to pay coders to write it. The non-commercial nature of the agreement with Zap2It precluded commercial development of MythTV appliances, so we haven't seen that sort of involvement.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>Asterisk still has ownership issues, though. It's largely useless without one key piece of hardware -- the Digium TDM card. Only Digium really knows how to write drivers for that card, and the Asterisk community is highly dependent on them to fix bugs and add features. If Digium decided to get out of that business Asterisk would be little better off than we are right now with Zap2It Labs closing up shop.<BR></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>