Page 33 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

remember when rotary dial mattered, enterprise telecom people who recall when voi-
cemail was the hottest new technology, and data communications geeks and coders
who helped build the Internet. These people all share a common belief—that the tel-
ecommunications industry needs a proper revolution. †

Asterisk is the catalyst.

Asterisk: The Hacker’s PBX

Telecommunications companies who choose to ignore Asterisk do so at their peril. The
flexibility it delivers creates possibilities that the best proprietary systems can scarcely
dream of. This is because Asterisk is the ultimate hacker’s PBX.
If someone asks you not to use the term hacker, refuse. This term does not belong to
the mass media. They stole it and corrupted it to mean “malicious cracker.” It’s time
we took it back. Hackers built the networking engine that is the Internet. Hackers built
the Apple Macintosh and the Unix operating system. Hackers are also building your
next telecom system. Do not fear; these are the good guys, and they’ll be able to build
a system that’s far more secure than anything that exists today. Rather than being
constricted by the dubious and easily cracked security of closed systems, the hackers
will be able to quickly respond to changing trends in security and fine-tune the tele-
phone system in response to both corporate policy and industry best practices.
Like other open source systems, Asterisk will be able to evolve into a far more secure
platform than any proprietary system, not in spite of its hacker roots, but rather because
of them.

Asterisk: The Professional’s PBX

Never in the history of telecommunications has a system so suited to the needs of
business been available, at any price. Asterisk is an enabling technology and, as with
Linux, it will become increasingly rare to find an enterprise that is not running some
version of Asterisk, in some capacity, somewhere in the network, solving a problem as
only Asterisk can.
This acceptance is likely to happen much faster than it did with Linux, though, for
several reasons:

• Linux has already blazed the trail that led to open source acceptance. Asterisk is
following that lead.
• The telecom industry is crippled, with no leadership being provided by the giant
industry players. Asterisk has a compelling, realistic, and exciting vision.

† The telecom industry has been predicting a revolution since before the crash; time will tell how well they
respond to the open source revolution.

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