Page 348 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Refusing to Let Go of the Past and Embrace the Future
Traditional telecommunications companies have lost touch with their customers.
While the concept of adding functionality beyond the basic telephone is well under-
stood, the idea that the user should be the one defining this functionality is not.

Nowadays, people have nearly limitless flexibility in every other form of communica-
tion. They simply cannot understand why telecommunications cannot be delivered as
flexibly as the industry has been promising for so many years. The concept of flexibility
is not familiar to the telecom industry, and very well might not be until open source
products such as Asterisk begin to transform the fundamental nature of the industry.
This is a revolution similar to the one Linux and the Internet willingly started more
than 10 years ago (and IBM unwittingly started with the PC, 15 years before that). What
is this revolution? The commoditization of telephony hardware and software, enabling
a proliferation of tailor-made telecommunications systems.

Paradigm Shift

In “Paradigm Shift” (http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html), Tim
O’Reilly talks about a paradigm shift that is occurring in the way technology (both
§
hardware and software) is delivered. O’Reilly identifies three trends:
the commoditization of software, network-enabled collaboration, and
software customizability (software as a service). These three concepts provide evidence
to suggest that open source telephony is an idea whose time has come.

The Promise of Open Source Telephony

Every good work of software starts by scratching a de-
veloper’s personal itch.
—Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly), Eric S. Raymond explains that
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” The reason open source software de-
velopment produces such consistent quality is simple: crap can’t hide.

The Itch That Asterisk Scratches

In this era of custom database and web site development, people are not only tired of
hearing that their telephone system “can’t do that,” they quite frankly just don’t believe
it. The creative needs of the customers, coupled with the limitations of the technology,
have spawned a type of creativity born of necessity: telecom engineers are like

§ Much of the following section is merely our interpretation of O’Reilly’s article. To get the full gist of these
ideas, the full read is highly recommended.

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