Ward, I've been working on a response to your post, but before responding directly to your post, I figured it would be worthwhile to take a step back and make sure I fully understand your concerns. To this end, I've put together a list of what I believe to be the biggest concerns expressed in your post, the comments that were made to your post, and to the thread on your forum. I've worded them as a series of questions, some with multiple sub-questions. (The questions are in no particular order.) Would you mind taking a look at this list of questions, and make sure I'm not off in left field here? I'll then try to address each one as best I can. If there are questions that you think don't need to be answered or that you would add to add to this list, feel free to let me know. 1) Why do the source-code level APIs change? 1a) How often do they change? 1b) Are they changed arbitrarily, or on a whim? 1c) Do the developers attempt to maintain backward compatibility when they make changes? 2) Why did the developers make changes to the dialplan syntax? 2a) Were the changes to the dialplan syntax made because someone thought one syntax looked prettier than another? 2b) How can I know what changes I'll have to make to my dialplan should I choose to upgrade to a new version of Asterisk? 2c) Do you forsee any other changes happening to the Asterisk dialplan syntax? 2d) Were these dialplan changes to try to eliminate competition or otherwise hurt projects competing with Digium's commercial products? 3) Why did the developers change the syntax of the Asterisk CLI? 3a) Were these changes made arbitrarily? 4) When will Asterisk 1.6.0 be released? 4a) Is Asterisk 1.6 backward-compatible with Asterisk 1.4 4b) Are there major changes to the dialplan syntax or CLI between Asterisk 1.4 and Asterisk 1.6? 4c) Once Asterisk 1.6.0 is released, how long will Asterisk 1.4 continue to receive bug fixes? What about security updates? 4d) Will my third-party application be ready in time for the release of Asterisk 1.6.0? 4e) Has Digium written a program that will automatically convert my dialplan to the very newest syntax? 4f) My version of app_swift won't compile against Asterisk 1.6.0, due to a change in the Asterisk configuration parsing API. Why was that change made? Was it done on purpose to keep app_swift from working with Asterisk? 5) Why did Digium stop shipping the TDM400P card and replace it with the TDM410P? 5a) Will Digium use this as an opportunity to stop their competitors in the hardware space from using the Zaptel drivers? 5b) Is Digium going to stop Zaptel cards from working just because you install a GUI like FreePBX? 6) Why did Digium buy Switchvox? 6a) Does this mean Digium will purposely add or change things in Asterisk to make it harder for other GUIs to compete with Switchvox? 6b) Now that Digium owns Switchvox, have they stopped caring about Open Source? 7) What about long-term support for Asterisk releases? I'm not ready to move to Asterisk 1.4, let alone Asterisk 1.6. What can I do? --- Jared Smith Community Relations Manager Digium, Inc.