The Darker Side of Digium?
Source: smithonvoip.com
It seems that Digium, the creators of Asterisk, have registered purchased www.asteriskathome.com, the former domain and name of the open source project TrixBox, and is re-directing it to their latest project AsteriskNow, Digium’s answer to TrixBox. I found out about this a few days ago, but when Tom and Alec weighed-in on this, I thought I would throw my hat in the ring as well.
For those of you who do not know, Asterisk@Home was created by Andrew Gillis and was designed to enable the home (or small office) user to quickly set up a full featured Asterisk PBX with a web based interface in about an hour on a dedicated PC. The ease of installation, the graphical user interface, and increased features/functionality (including integration with sales force) made Asterisk@Home an enormouse hit and allegedly lead to legal pressure (from trademark infringement) from Digium (owner of the Asterisk trademark) forcing Andrew to change the open source project name to TrixBox, which was recently acquired by Fonality.
All of this seems a bit “rough neck” for an open source company. Pressuring a project (which was started from the same community that helped make Asterisk the success it is today) to change its name once it became a perceived competitor to the Asterisk software. Not to mention that their trademark policy seems a bit selective, when a quick search of Google shows the following sites utilizing the Asterisk/Digium brand name for commercial purposes.
http://www.digium.co.uk/
http://www.digiumcards.com/
http://www.asteriskhardware.com
http://www.asteriskdocs.com
http://www.asteriskguru.com
http://www.asteriskvoipnews.com
http://www.asterisk.co.nz
http://www.asterisktutorials.com
As a marketing professional myself, I am big on protecting a brand name and trademarks. If you are going to police it though, be consistent about it. Do not be selective and do it to keep your brand name from losing its “value”, not to increase traffic to your own site for nothing other then perceived capitalistic gain. As Alec suggested, “buy the domain and bury it.”
What ever happen to altruistic open source companies?
