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A friend of mine closed his company in 2013 and had a full avaya system with 40 phones and latest software that he could not even give away. Eventually some kids from a local hackerspace came and hauled away the whole lot. They were after the headsets and lcds.

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I think this is pretty standard in the pbx business. The manufacturers don't give out the complete documentation for the system, so it is useless without paying money to your local dealer. Your local dealer doesn't want to help you with a used system, he'd prefer to sell you a brand new one. Source: I work for a dealer.

I worked for a dealer. The configuration utility for Cisco PBXes (piece of crap, by the way) can only be downloaded by certified Cisco partners. Or BitTorrent.

Hell, even the firmware + config can only be downloaded that way. This means if you got used phones that were configured for the proprietary SCCP, you wouldn't be able to reconfigure them as SIP phones without paying the big bucks. Yes, I know about Asterisk's chan_sccp.

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