[Mac-telephony-list] Community voting on new name for Mac PBX

[Sunrise Ltd via List]

Dear all,

this summer we decided to postpone the release of a new Macintosh PBX  
package which was to be based on our Xcode port of Asterisk and  
instead use OpenPBX.org as a base for a new release.

OpenPBX.org is a vendor independent cross-platform telephony engine  
derived from Asterisk 1.2. In our view, OpenPBX.org is a much  
improved version of the Asterisk code base. In particular, the focus  
on cross-platform compatibility will be of great benefit to Macintosh  
users and developers.

For example, dependencies on Digium hardware and zaptel drivers have  
been replaced with software based timers. As a result, features which  
require a timing reference to work or to work well are available with  
OpenPBX.org even on MacOS X and other operating systems which do not  
have zaptel support.

Also, we found the OpenPBX.org developer community more collegial and  
less indifferent to MacOS X than the Asterisk developer community. In  
fact, Sunrise has been granted write access to the source code  
repository and we will work together with the project team on  
continued MacOS X platform support.

A comprehensive overview of the OpenPBX.org project can be found at  
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/OpenPBX.org

However, this change has some administrative implications. It will no  
longer make sense to use the name "Mac Asterisk" or "Macintosh  
Asterisk" for the software distribution. In fact, Digium's trademark  
policy states that the Asterisk name can only be used for  
*unmodified* Digium releases of the Asterisk code. For a number of  
reasons we don't want to go into here, we didn't want to call the new  
distribution anything like "Mac OpenPBX" either.

Anyway, a short list of candidates for a new name is now up for the  
community to give feedback on at

http://www.sunrise-tel.com/new-name/voting.php

Please visit this page and cast your vote during the next few days.

At present OpenPBX.org is available as a release candidate (RC2)  
which can be built and run on MacOS X. A regular OpenPBX.org release  
is expected in late December and we intend to release a MacOS X  
installer based on it shortly thereafter.

thank you for your patronage

Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd.

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PS: The community website formerly at astmasters.net will be shortly  
be relaunched under the mactelephony.net domain.