Page 32 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Those are just two examples; the industry is rife with them.
Now, it’s all very well and good to pick on one system, but the reality is that every PBX
in existence suffers shortcomings. No matter how fully featured it is, something will
always be left out, because even the most feature-rich PBX will always fail to anticipate
the creativity of the customer. A small group of users will desire an odd little feature
that the design team either did not think of or could not justify the cost of building,
and, since the system is closed, the users will not be able to build it themselves.
If the Internet had been thusly hampered by regulation and commercial interests, it is
doubtful that it would have developed the wide acceptance it currently enjoys. The
openness of the Internet meant that anyone could afford to get involved. So, everyone
did. The tens of thousands of minds that collaborated on the creation of the Internet
delivered something that no corporation ever could have.
As with many other open source projects, such as Linux and the Internet, the devel-
opment of Asterisk was fueled by the dreams of folks who knew that there had to be
something more than what the industry was producing. The strength of the community
is that it is composed not of employees assigned to specific tasks, but rather of folks
from all sorts of industries, with all sorts of experiences, and all sorts of ideas about
what flexibility means, and what openness means. These people knew that if one could
take the best parts of various PBXes and separate them into interconnecting compo-
nents—akin to a boxful of LEGO bricks—one could begin to conceive of things that
would not survive a traditional corporate risk-analysis process. While no one can se-
riously claim to have a complete picture of what this thing should look like, there is no
shortage of opinions and ideas. #
Many people new to Asterisk see it as unfinished. Perhaps these people can be likened
to visitors to an art studio, looking to obtain a signed, numbered print. They often leave
disappointed, because they discover that Asterisk is the blank canvas, the tubes of paint,
the unused brushes waiting. *
Even at this early stage in its success, Asterisk is nurtured by a greater number of artists
than any other PBX. Most manufacturers dedicate no more than a few developers to
any one product; Asterisk has scores. Most proprietary PBXes have a worldwide sup-
port team comprised of a few dozen real experts; Asterisk has hundreds.
The depth and breadth of the expertise that surrounds this product is unmatched in
the telecom industry. Asterisk enjoys the loving attention of old Telco guys who

# From the release of Asterisk 1.2 to Asterisk 1.4, there have been over 4,000 updates to the code in the SVN
repository.
* It should be noted that these folks need not leave disappointed. Several projects have arisen to lower the
barriers to entry for Asterisk. By far the most popular and well known is trixbox (http://www.trixbox.org). If
you have an old PC lying around (or a copy of VMware), trixbox will build a GUI-based PBX for you simply
by answering a few questions during the automated install process. This does not make it easier to learn
Asterisk, because you are no longer involved in the platform or dialplan configuration, but it will deliver a
working PBX to you much faster than the more hands-on approach we employ in this book.

4 | Chapter 1: A Telephony Revolution