Open $ource?
This just in! The patch is now available here.
A recent open letter posted to voip-info.org states that Asterisk multi-parking may not be implemented in 1.6 due to lack of funding. It goes on to say that one of the developers has done a lot of work on this and has only 5 hours left to go. If he's paid $200 per hour, he can rearrange his commitments and complete this for 1.6.
Hey, I'm all for contributing money to the Asterisk developers, it's a great product. Let's just send 'em money.
Meanwhile, I've already implemented multiparking. My solution has these characteristics:
Each company (or context if you prefer - mine is a multi-company hosted PBX solution) has its own park prefix, a single digit reserved for the parking lot. They need not be unique - all companies can use the same prefix and their parked calls will not be accessible to each other.
The number of digits in a parked extension is configurable in features.conf. This normally would be set to match the number of digits in the extensions being used by each company.
When you park a call either by executing the Park() app or by using the one-touch park (defined in features.conf), the system speaks the parked extension and hangs up, and the call is parked.
You can then dial the parked extension from any phone to pick up the call. If you forget or don't wait for the voiced extension, you can dial X* (where X is your park prefix) to pick up the most recently parked call.
If you are at Company X and you park a call, you may hear for example "423". If you then pick up a phone and dial 423, you retrieve the parked call. If, on the other hand, you pick up a phone at Company Y and dial 423, you hear "I'm sorry, there is no call parked at that extension" and it hangs up on you.
If you dial "4*" from Company Y, you will get the most recently parked call at Company Y, if any. In no case can Company Y pick up a call that was parked by Company X.
If there is sufficient interest I will put this together as a patch and publish it. I won't turn away payment, but this IS open source, right?
Express interest by using the contact form above or send email to david@redroad.com.
Aloha!
Comments
Give em money
I am the one who wrote the open letter and I have some comments to your comment.
Open source does not mean that the contributors aren’t allowed to get paid for their time, in the contrary we need to make it worthwhile for them, and have the people who cant wait for it, pay and then donate it to the public, and the rest of us just have to wait and have it on the developers terms.
I felt that Multiparking is a feature which a lot of people cant wait to have, especially now that lots of companies offer hosted PBX service, and a hosted PBX is useless for lots of companies if it lacks parking, and still it has been abandoned by the asterisk developers, I did some goggling and discovered that a Asterisk developer has done lots of work on it 2 years ago and then buried it under the rug, so I emailed the developer and he told me that he abandoned it because of a lack of funding, and I felt it was a shame that $1000 can make the difference between having Asterisk run virtual PBX servers or to have the competitors PBX run the servers, so I decided to post the open letter to revive the Multiparking project, and I hope I succeed, and I don’t care if its your solution or anyone else’s solution, as long as it works and it gets implemented.
I must admit that when the developer told me that he would like to get paid, I had this bad feeling that he is commercializing the open source, but on second thought I realized, that first of all this developer is giving it away for almost free, he has put in lots of hours which he is not charging for, he is just in a situation where he has projects that he is getting paid for, therefore he can’t work on a project now that he does not get paid for, and second of all the open source community needs to keep its contributors happy, because if they wont be happy, there will be no open source, therefore as you wrote “lets just send em money”
Scot Rosenberg
VP
EZ Telephones Inc.