Page 14 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Adtran, where I had worked as a co-op student. Once I got a call into a PC, I fantasized,
I could do anything with it. In fact, it is from this conjecture that the official Asterisk
motto (which any sizable, effective project must have) is derived:
It’s only software!
For better or worse, I rarely think small. Right from the start, it was my intent that
Asterisk would do everything related to telephony. The name “Asterisk” was chosen
because it was both a key on a standard telephone and also the wildcard symbol in
Linux (e.g., rm -rf *).
So, in 1999, I had a free telephony platform I’d put out on the Web and I went about
my business trying to eke out a living at providing Linux technical support. However,
by 2001, as the economy was tanking, it became apparent that Linux Support Services
might do better by pursuing Asterisk than general-purpose Linux technical support.
That year, we would make contact with Jim “Dude” Dixon of the Zapata Telephony
project. Dude’s exciting work was a fantastic companion to Asterisk and provided a
business model for us to start pursuing Asterisk with more focus. After creating our
first PCI telephony interface card in conjunction with Dude, it became clear that “Linux
Support Services” was not the best name for a telephony company, and so we changed
the name to “Digium,” which is a whole other story that cannot be effectively conveyed
in writing. Enter the expansion of Voice over IP (VoIP) with its disruptive transition of
voice from the old, circuit-switched networks to new IP-based networks, and things
really started to take hold.
Now, as we’ve already covered, clearly most people don’t get very excited about tele-
phones. Certainly, few people could share my excitement the moment I heard a dial
tone coming from a phone connected to my PC. However, those who do get excited
about telephones get really excited about telephones. And facilitated by the Internet,
this small group of people were now able to unite and apply our bizarre passions to a
common, practical project for the betterment of many.
To say that telecom was ripe for an open source solution would be an immeasurable
understatement. Telecom is an enormous market due to the ubiquity of telephones in
work and personal life. The direct market for telecom products has a highly technical
audience that is willing and able to contribute. People demand their telecom solutions
be infinitely customizable. Proprietary telecom is very expensive. Creating Asterisk was
simply the spark in this fuel-rich backdrop.
Asterisk sits at the apex of a variety of transitions (proprietary → open source; circuit
switched → VoIP; voice only → voice, video, and data; digital signal processing → host
media processing; centralized directory → peer to peer) while easing those transitions
by providing bridges back to the older ways of doing things. Asterisk can talk to any-
thing from a 1960s-era pulse-dial phone to the latest wireless VoIP devices, and provide
features from simple tandem switching all the way to Bluetooth presence and DUNDi.

Most important of all, though, Asterisk demonstrates how a community of motivated
people and companies can work together to create a project with a scope so significant

xii | Foreword