Page 350 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

one of these companies were to suggest that we could only use their products with
whatever they told us, they would be laughed out of business.
The telecommunications industry is facing the same changes, but it’s in no hurry to
accept them. Asterisk, on the other hand, is in a big hurry to not only accept change,
but embrace it.
Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, and Polycom IP phones (to name just a few) have all been suc-
cessfully connected to Asterisk systems. There is no other PBX in the world today that
can make this claim. None.
Openness is the power of Asterisk.

Standards Compliance

In the past few years, it has become clear that standards evolve at such a rapid pace
that to keep up with them requires an ability to quickly respond to emerging technology
trends. Asterisk, by virtue of being an open source, community-driven development
effort, is uniquely suited to the kind of rapid development that standards compliance
demands.
Asterisk does not focus on cost-benefit analysis or market research. It evolves in re-
sponse to whatever the community finds exciting—or necessary.

Lightning-Fast Response to New Technologies

After Mark Spencer attended his first SIP Interoperability Test (SIPIT) event, he had a
rudimentary but working SIP stack for Asterisk coded within a few days. This was
before SIP had emerged as the protocol of choice in the VoIP world, but he saw its value
and momentum and ensured that Asterisk would be ready.

This kind of foresight and flexibility is typical in an open source development com-
munity (and very unusual in a large corporation).

Passionate Community

The Asterisk-users list receives many email messages per day. More than 10,000 people
are subscribed to it. This kind of community support is unheard of in the world of
proprietary telecommunications, while in the open source world it is commonplace.
The very first AstriCon event was expected to attract 100 participants. Nearly 500
showed up (far more wanted to but couldn’t attend). This kind of community support
virtually guarantees the success of an open source effort.

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