Page 345 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

CHAPTER 15

Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, then you win.
—Mahatma Gandhi

We have arrived at the final chapter of this book. We’ve covered a lot, but we hope
that you now realize that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of this phenom-
enon called Asterisk. To wrap things up, we want to spend some time exploring what
we might see from Asterisk and open source telephony in the near future.
While prognostication is always a thankless task, we are confident in asserting that
open source communications engines such as Asterisk herald a shift in thinking that
will transform the telecommunications industry. In this chapter, we will discuss some
of our reasons for this belief.

The Problems with Traditional Telephony

Although Alexander Graham Bell is most famously remembered as the father of the
telephone, the reality is that during the latter half of the 1800s, dozens of minds were
working toward the goal of carrying voice over telegraph lines. These people were
mostly business-minded folks, looking to create a product through which they might
make their fortunes.
We have come to think of traditional telephone companies as monopolies, but this was
not true in their early days. The early history of telephone service took place in a very
competitive environment, with new companies springing up all over the world, often
with little or no respect for the patents they might be violating. Many famous monop-
olies got their start through the waging (and winning) of patent wars.
It’s interesting to contrast the history of the telephone with the history of Linux and
the Internet. While the telephone was created as a commercial exercise, and the telecom
industry was forged through lawsuits and corporate takeovers, Linux and the Internet
arose out of the academic community, which has always valued the sharing of
knowledge over profit.

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