I love open source software so much that nearly our entire enterprise is running on it. Our internally developed software is all either written for LAMP, or some recently in Mono.

I fully understand that open source projects will sometimes become inactive, in fact I have a few I've developed myself that have fallen by the wayside yet at one time had great potential.

What I don't understand is when a commercially backed open-source solution like Openfire from Ignite Realtime has a known issue for years that goes unresolved and requires a simple workaround. Then again, who here hasn't heard of Internet Explorer?

Integrating the Openfire instant messaging system with an Asterisk phone server is relatively easy, but when you first attempt to connect it to the Asterisk server, it just does nothing. It turns out the setup script for the Asterisk-IM plugin is wrong... and has been since 2007.

Here's the solution.

I will say though, I still love Openfire with it's LDAP directory integration and my (now working) Asterisk phone system integration. The ability to know the phone status of any user by glancing at my contact list is such a small thing, but it really does make a difference.