Have you noticed how http://www.asteriskathome.com points to http://www.asterisknow.org/, a site that promotes AsteriskNOW, a new software distribution that includes a customized version of Linux, Asterisk, the Asterisk GUI, and all other software needed for an Asterisk system. AsteriskNOW is promoted as an easy to install turnkey installation when it says, "AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy." Doesn't this turnkey Asterisk sounds eerily similar to the old Asterisk@Home project which was recently renamed to trixbox?
The site www.asteriskathome.com is offering a competing product to trixbox (Asterisk@Home), which is now owned by Fonality. Fonality is a company that sells PBXtra and is a competitor to Digium.. www.asterisknow.org, where asteriskathome.com redirects to, is registered to you guessed it -- Digium Inc. which now offers an Asterisk distro that "aims" to be as easy to install as trixbox/Asterisk@home. Quite a nice rivalry, eh? While I applaud Digium for adding a GUI and making AsteriskNOW an easy to install Asterisk distro, why take a domain name associated with a competing Asterisk distro and competing company? My first thoughts on this were:
When I visited Digium's offices I heard a group of employees playing some Linux shoot-em up game and shouting (gotta love that corporate environment).
Now, I can only picture a group of Linux gurus huddled around, as they clicked the Submit button to register this asteriskathome.com domain followed by a few chuckles. But then it occurred to me that perhaps Digium wasn't involved with this at all. I checked the whois directory and saw that the domain was registered to Mitchel Constantin from a company called Dirty Clothing. I googled his name and see that he is indeed on Asterisk's mailing lists and seems very involved with the community - however he doesn't appear to be a Digium employee.
After some further investigation I discovered he works for or wrote the Asterisk application called Snap, that includes a dialer and call popup application for Asterisk with Outlook integration and a Firefox plugin. Actually, this seems like a pretty cool app that I'll have to check out.
Obviously, Mitchel is a huge Digium fan, the company that founded the Asterisk movement, and which apparently has spawned at least one 'domain turf battle' by a devoted (zealous?) Digium fan.
Lame to take this domain & direct it to Digium's website? Or pretty funny?
You make the call.
The site www.asteriskathome.com is offering a competing product to trixbox (Asterisk@Home), which is now owned by Fonality. Fonality is a company that sells PBXtra and is a competitor to Digium.. www.asterisknow.org, where asteriskathome.com redirects to, is registered to you guessed it -- Digium Inc. which now offers an Asterisk distro that "aims" to be as easy to install as trixbox/Asterisk@home. Quite a nice rivalry, eh? While I applaud Digium for adding a GUI and making AsteriskNOW an easy to install Asterisk distro, why take a domain name associated with a competing Asterisk distro and competing company? My first thoughts on this were:
Why even go there? Is Digium’s goal to rank highly on the search engines for the search term “asterisk at home” or “asterisk@home” so that they direct people to their competing solution?. Seems a bit childish.Personally, I doubt most Asterisk fans aren’t already aware that Asterisk@Home is now trixbox, so I doubt Digium will get any search engine referral traffic even if they did rank highly for the keywords. I’ve been to Digium’s offices and I know they are filled with many smart Linux people, so surely they know they won’t get any SEO benefit from registering www.asteriskathome.com. So is the motive simply because they could do it or should we view this as a childish prank?
When I visited Digium's offices I heard a group of employees playing some Linux shoot-em up game and shouting (gotta love that corporate environment).
Now, I can only picture a group of Linux gurus huddled around, as they clicked the Submit button to register this asteriskathome.com domain followed by a few chuckles. But then it occurred to me that perhaps Digium wasn't involved with this at all. I checked the whois directory and saw that the domain was registered to Mitchel Constantin from a company called Dirty Clothing. I googled his name and see that he is indeed on Asterisk's mailing lists and seems very involved with the community - however he doesn't appear to be a Digium employee.After some further investigation I discovered he works for or wrote the Asterisk application called Snap, that includes a dialer and call popup application for Asterisk with Outlook integration and a Firefox plugin. Actually, this seems like a pretty cool app that I'll have to check out.
Obviously, Mitchel is a huge Digium fan, the company that founded the Asterisk movement, and which apparently has spawned at least one 'domain turf battle' by a devoted (zealous?) Digium fan.
Lame to take this domain & direct it to Digium's website? Or pretty funny?
You make the call.
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Asterisk is a trademark of Digium. The project formerly known as Asterisk@Home was renamed “Trixbox.” How is it childish to protect legitimate trademarks?
>>Asterisk is a trademark of Digium. The project formerly known as Asterisk@Home was renamed “Trixbox.” How is it childish to protect legitimate trademarks?
A valid assertion, except there are plenty of cases of people using the name "Asterisk" within their domain name. Asterisk VoIP Blog - http://asteriskvoip.blogspot.com/ is one example.
Even the infamous Apple Blog (http://theappleblog.com) uses the trademarked Apple in its domain name. I'm sure there are hundreds of other cases.
I don't believe Digium sued Asterisk@Home to try and get them to reliquish the rights to the Asterisk@Home name. In fact, I remember reading Tom's blog post stating that Digium had given Asterisk@Home permission to use the name.
Trixbox 1.0 replaces Asterisk@Home
Here's 2 important snippets:
[snip 1]
"I can speculate that my pal Mark Spencer over at Digium sent Asterisk@Home a "cease & desist letter" to protect his trademark. Although, I'm not sure if Mark even has a trademark on the brand "Asterisk". I'll have to shoot him off an email and ask. But if he does, then you can't blame him if he is indeed trying to protect his brand. If you don't vigorously protect your brand and it becomes watered down and used by everyone, then you can lose your rights to the trademark. This whole point may be moot since I believe you can't trademark GPL open-source code projects. Where's a trademark lawyer when you need one?"
[snip 2]
"Update: I received an email from Ward Mundy stating that Digium did give permission to use the Asterisk@Home name. He stated "Asterisk@Home was suitable for home and business use. A lot of customers were apparently put off by the @Home moniker." I suppose I can see the @Home moniker hurting its "business-class" image."
Taking the asteriskathome.com domain does seem to be a bit infantile, especially since the Asterisk@Home project no longer exists. It's now Trixbox. Of course I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of old webpages that talk about Asterisk@Home that aren't updated. So any Asterisk newbies that see Asterisk@Home mention might be tempted to google it and come across Digium's website instead. A form of stealth marketing I suppose.
Still, like Tom said, the chances of asteriskathome.com getting any search engine traffic is small. Currently this domain is not even on the first page of Google. In fact, http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ is #1 and it points to the trixbox Asterisk distribution.
I won't classify this tactic "lame", especially since it doesn't appear to be done by a direct Digium employee. It is somewhat amusing to us in the Asterisk community to see two different factions play some relatively friendly war games. Just as long as they don't go hacking each other's websites, I'm cool with it.