Telephony-Summit (Di, 02.05.2006)

The Asterisk Project - Past, Present and Future

von Kevin P. Fleming (Digium, Inc.)

Dienstag, 02.05.2006, Raum 1A-3, 16:50-17:20 Uhr

The Asterisk project has quickly grown from a small telephone system developed by a university student in Huntsville, Alabama to a worldwide telephony phenomenon. There have only been two major releases of Asterisk and its associated projects, but the number of installations grows at an exponential pace and the deployment of Asterisk has touched on every area of voice communications, even those not related to the traditional switched telephone network.

As the project has grown over the last 18 months or so, the community's involvement in contributing patches and new features has grown at an even faster pace (and this does not include contributions from companies sponsoring Asterisk's development directly). To begin to get control over this process, the Asterisk Advisory Council has been formed to manage the pool of 'official' Asterisk developers, ensuring that those with privileges to work on the official Asterisk source code participate in the community by supporting their own code (and others), communicating with the community about what they are working on and helping to resolve bugs and open issues with the entire code base. In addition, the Council will set and manage Asterisk release cycles and provide resolution of issues related to code quality and architectural compatibility.

At the same time, the project has moved towards a major new release, version 1.4, which includes many significant new features and also has undergone extensive code cleanup and reorganization. Many contributors who have joined the project in the past year have focused their efforts on improving the Asterisk code base (rather than adding new functionality), and the results of their efforts are impressive. In addition, a significant amount of time has been put into creating Doxygen documentation of the Asterisk APIs used by loadable modules, making it easier to develop and distribute add-on modules that extend Asterisk's functionality. The Asterisk 1.4 release is scheduled to occur on or about July 1st, 2006.

Finally, there appears to be a groundswell of companies and organizations willing to provide dedicated Asterisk development resources (not the least of which is Digium, the primary sponsor of Asterisk). There are currently at least six people who work full-time on improving Asterisk, and there may be as many as a dozen people in that position by the end of this year. We see this as a very big benefit for the community, because it will allow the development of a 'roadmap' for Asterisk to gain new functionality and allocation of resources to ensure that that roadmap targets are met (which is normally a major problem with open source development projects).

Über den Autor Kevin P. Fleming:

Kevin P. Fleming has been programming computers for over two decades in every major programming language, and many minor ones. He has worked in fields such as traditional client/server database applications, open source messaging and networking, mainframe operating system and warehouse automation. Kevin's primary skills are problem analysis and solution design, and producing optimal solutions that use resources efficiently and effectively.

Kevin has been an active member of the worldwide Open Source community for over five years, and has made contributions to many projects, including the Linux kernel, the Exim SMTP MTA and the OpenVPN network tunneling package. He fervently believes that Open Source software is the 'right' way to do things and strives to use Open Source solutions whenever possible.

In the summer of 2004, Kevin and a partner started a small VoIP ITSP operation in Phoenix, Arizona and chose Asterisk as their platform for switching and hosted PBX services. During the next few months, they dealt with many issues in Asterisk that required modification of the source code, and Kevin posted those patches for Digium to merge into the main Asterisk source tree.

In June of 2005, Kevin became a full time employee of Digium, and began managing the 'bug tracker' and the community interaction related to it. At Astricon 2005, Mark officially announced that Kevin is the 'co-maintainer' of the Asterisk development tree (along with Mark himself) and since that time they have been actively working to prepare the Asterisk 1.2 release.