Our Master Plan
It's true there's serious commercial intent motivating the activities at Star2Star Communications and yes, we do have a plan for world domination, but that's not the reason we are offering the StarBox-X and sponsoring and supporting this website.
We really believe it's important that the rich and rapid exchange of ideas is critical to the long term success of Asterisk-based products. In the long run, we believe people won't really ask for a "phone system". Instead, they will ask for a business communications system that integrates telephony, desktop applications and the Internet.
Attempts by any single vendor to attempt to build this all or control it are doomed.
On the other hand, just trusting to open source and the energy of thousands of smart people may not deliver this nirvana either. We figure that the smart strategy is to energetically support innovation without attempting to control it and then figure out how to make the best use of it for the benefit of all those who create the innovation and those who want to partake of it.
So, over time, you will see code samples, and even fully realized products, that make use of StarBox-X. In some cases, authors may wish to see their work offered commercially. We'll do that at our commercial site and through our dealer network. Other developers making use of StarBox-X may want to become dealers themselves and we will welcome that.
Throughout it all, we pledge to support open source principles and, if we develop code that, on a standalone basis, has value to the wider community of Asterisk developers, we will put it back into that community. An example of this is our recent announcement to return a TAPI dialer to open source.