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cate. Today, we have achieved a most remarkable thing: it is now reasonable to expect
instant communication with almost anyone on the planet.
The challenge we never predicted is that too much of a good thing has begun to over‐
whelm us. It will be interesting to see how this plays out culturally.
The Problems with Open Source Development
Although Alexander Graham Bell is most famously remembered as the father of the
telephone,1 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
monopolies 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 GNU 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 tended to value the sharing
of knowledge over profit.
Unfortunately, once again too much of a good thing has begun to overwhelm. What
we have seen recently is a loss of vision for open source development. Too few devel‐
opers have gotten tired of the demands of too many users unwilling to contribute.
Most open source projects have—out of necessity—had to shield the development
team from the selfish demands of those who intend to only take, and never give. This
abuse of the developers has, sadly, even extended to companies that have built highly
profitable businesses on open source projects that they have never contributed a dime
to. Multibillion-dollar businesses, profiting from the efforts of a team barely able to
pay their bills, is not a sustainable development model. It remains to be seen how this
story will play out, but open source software is not what it was 10 years ago.
Asterisk is fortunate in that it is funded by the efforts of Sangoma/Digium, the
parents of the project. Their challenge has and always will be to figure out how to
nurture the product in such a way that the requirements of the business are compati‐
1 Ever heard of Elisha Gray or Antonio Meucci?
The Problems with Open Source Development
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ble with the needs of the project. Not an easy task. We’ll be cheering for them. They
have done a remarkable job thus far.
The Future of Asterisk
So, does Asterisk have a future? We don’t see why it shouldn’t. It continues to do what
it has always done, and it also works hard to be compatible with suitable technologies
coming down the pipe. If nothing else, Asterisk will continue to be very good at inte‐
grating with telephone technologies, and we’re not prepared to call that story fully
told yet.
WebRTC
Keep an eye on WebRTC. We suspect that if open source and open-standards com‐
munications has any sort of future, WebRTC stands as the most promising candidate
to achieve that.
Asterisk is not likely to be at the center of that revolution, but it will have a role to
play.
The Future of Telephony
Telephony may look dead, but we still see movement in the tail, and it’s a long tail
indeed.
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Chapter 23: Asterisk: A Future for Telephony
Index
Symbols
#asterisk and #asterisk-dev (Asterisk IRC chan‐
nels), 7
${EXTEN} channel variable, 104
911 emergency number, 125
A
access control lists (ACLs), 373
account scanning, 367
ACD queues, 286
Alembic, 40
analog telephony, 111, 151
Analog Terminal Adaptors (ATAs)
advantages and disadvantages of, 64
defined, 63
IP phone configuration, 153
Ansible playbooks, 30
application map groupings, 194