System information
corporate risk-analysis process. While no one can seriously claim to have a complete
picture of what this thing should look like, there is no shortage of opinions and ideas.
§
Many people new to Asterisk see it as unfinished. Perhaps these people can be likened
to visitors to an art studio, looking to obtain a signed, numbered print. They often leave
disappointed, because they discover that Asterisk is the blank canvas, the tubes of paint,
the unused brushes waiting.
‖
Even at this early stage in its success, Asterisk is nurtured by a greater number of artists
than any other PBX. Most manufacturers dedicate no more than a few developers to
any one product; Asterisk has scores. Most proprietary PBXs have a worldwide support
team comprising a few dozen real experts; Asterisk has hundreds.
The depth and breadth of the expertise that surrounds this product is unmatched in
the telecom industry. Asterisk enjoys the loving attention of old telco guys who
remember when rotary dial mattered, enterprise telecom people who recall when
voicemail was the hottest new technology, and data communications geeks and coders
who helped build the Internet. These people all share a common belief—that the
telecommunications industry needs a proper revolution.
#
Asterisk is the catalyst.
Asterisk: The Hacker’s PBX
Telecommunications companies that choose to ignore Asterisk do so at their peril. The
flexibility it delivers creates possibilities that the best proprietary systems can scarcely
dream of. This is because Asterisk is the ultimate hacker’s PBX.
The term hacker has, of course, been twisted by the mass media into meaning “mali-
cious cracker.” This is unfortunate, because the term actually existed long before the
media corrupted its meaning. Hackers built the networking engine that is the Internet.
Hackers built the Apple Macintosh and the Unix operating system. Hackers are also
building your next telecom system. Do not fear; these are the good guys, and they’ll be
able to build a system that’s far more secure than anything that exists today. Rather
than being constricted by the dubious and easily cracked security of closed systems,
§ Between the releases of Asterisk 1.2 and Asterisk 1.4, over 4,000 updates were made to the code in the SVN
repository. Between the releases of Asterisk 1.4 and 1.8, over 10,000 updates were made.
‖ It should be noted that these folks need not leave disappointed. Several projects have arisen to lower the
barriers to entry for Asterisk. By far the most popular and well known is the FreePBX interface (and the
multitude of projects based on it). These interfaces (check out http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk
+GUI for an idea of how many there are) do not make it easier to learn Asterisk, because they separate you
from the platform or dialplan configuration, but many of them will deliver a working PBX to you much faster
than the more hands-on approach we employ in this book.
#The telecom industry has been predicting a revolution since before the crash; time will tell how well it
responds to the open source revolution.
4 | Chapter 1: A Telephony Revolution