Foreword
Once upon a time, there was a boy.
...with a computer
...and a phone.
This simple beginning begat much trouble!
It wasn't that long ago that telecommunications,
both voice and data, as well as software, were all proprietary
products and services, controlled by one select club of companies
that created the technologies, and another select club of companies
who used the products to provide services. By the late 1990s, data
telecommunications had been opened by the expansion of the
Internet. Prices plummeted. New and innovative technologies,
services, and companies emerged. Meanwhile, the work of free
software pioneers like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and
countless others were culminating in the creation of a truly open
software platform called Linux (or GNU/Linux). However, voice
communications, ubiquitous as they were, remained proprietary. Why?
Perhaps it was because voice on the old public telephone network
lacked the glamor and promise of the shiny new World Wide Web. Or,
perhaps it's because a telephone just isn't as effective at
supplying adult entertainment. Whatever the reason, one thing was
clear. Open source voice communications was about as widespread as
open source copy protection software.
Necessity (and in some cases simply being cheap)
is truly the mother of invention. In 1999, having started Linux
Support Services to offer free and commercial technical support for
Linux, I found myself in need (or at least in perceived need) of a
phone system to assist me in providing 24-hour technical support.
The idea was that people would be able to call in, enter their
customer identity, and leave a message. The system would in turn
page a technician to respond to the customer's request in short
order. Since I had started the company with about $4000 of capital,
I was in no position to be able to afford a phone system of the
sort that I needed to implement this scenario. Having already been
a Linux user since 1994, and having already gotten my feet wet in
Open Source software development by starting l2tpd, gaim, and
cheops, and in the complete absence of anyone having explained the
complexity of such a task, I decided that I would simply make my
own phone system using hardware borrowed from Adtran, where I had
worked as a co-op student. Once I got a call into a PC, I
fantasized, I could do anything
with it. In fact, it is from this conjecture that the official
Asterisk motto (which any sizable, effective project must have) is
derived:
It's only
software!
For better or worse, I rarely think small. Right
from the start, it was my intent that Asterisk would do
everything related to telephony.
The name "Asterisk" was chosen because it was both a key on a
standard telephone and also the wildcard symbol in Linux (e.g.,
rm -rf *).
So, in 1999, I have a free telephony platform
I've put out on the web and I go about my business trying to eke
out a living at providing Linux technical support. However, by
2001, as the economy was tanking, it became apparent that Linux
Support Services might do better by pursuing Asterisk than general
purpose Linux technical support. That year, we would make contact
with Jim "Dude" Dixon of the Zapata Telephony project. Dude's
exciting work was a fantastic companion to Asterisk, and provided a
business model for us to start pursuing Asterisk with more focus.
After creating our first PCI telephony interface card in
conjunction with Dude, it became clear that "Linux Support
Services" was not the best name for a telephony company, and so we
changed the name to "Digium," which is a whole other story that
cannot be effectively conveyed in writing. Enter the expansion of
Voice over IP ("VoIP") with its disruptive transition of voice from
the old, circuit-switched networks to new IP-based networks and
things really started to take hold.
Now, as we've already covered, clearly most
people don't get very excited about telephones. Certainly, few
people could share my excitement the moment I heard dialtone coming
from a phone connected to my PC. However, those who do get excited about telephones get
really excited about telephones.
And facilitated by the Internet, this small group of people were
now able to unite and apply our bizarre passions to a common,
practical project for the betterment of many.
To say that telecom was ripe for an open source
solution would be an immeasurable understatement. Telecom is an
enormous market due to the ubiquity of telephones in work and
personal life. The direct market for telecom products has a highly
technical audience that is willing and able to contribute. People
demand their telecom solutions be infinitely customizable.
Proprietary telecom is very expensive. Creating Asterisk was simply
the spark in this fuel rich backdrop.
Asterisk sits at the apex of a variety of
transitions (Proprietary 
Open Source, Circuit Switched VoIP, Voice only
Voice, Video, and Data, Digital Signal Processing Host Media Processing, Centralized
Directory Peer to Peer)
while easing those transitions by providing bridges back to the
older ways of doing things. Asterisk can talk to anything from a
1960s era pulse dial phone to the latest wireless VoIP devices, and
provide features from simple tandem switching all the way to
bluetooth presence and DUNDi.
Most important of all, though, Asterisk
demonstrates how a community of motivated people and companies can
work together to create a project with a scope so significant that
no one person or company could have possibly created it on its own.
In making Asterisk possible, I particularly would like to thank
Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, the entire Asterisk community and
whoever invented Red Bull.
So where is Asterisk going from here? Think
about the history of the PC. When it was first introduced in 1980,
it had fairly limited capabilities. Maybe you could do a
spreadsheet, maybe do some word processing, but in the end, not
much. Over time, however, its open architecture led to price
reductions and new products allowing it to slowly expand its
applications, eventually displacing the mini computer, then the
mainframe. Now, even Cray supercomputers are built using
Linux-based x86 architectures. I anticipate that Asterisk's future
will look very similar. Today, there is a large subset of telephony
that is served by Asterisk. Tomorrow, who knows what the limit
might be.
So, what are you waiting for? Read, learn, and
participate in the future of open telecommunications by joining the
Asterisk revolution!
Mark Spencer
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