System information

The fact that a customer might only need five out of five hundred features is ignored,
and that customer’s desire to have five unavailable features that address the needs of
his business is dismissed as unreasonable.
‖
Until flexibility becomes standard, telecom
will remain stuck in the last century—all the VoIP in the world notwithstanding.
Asterisk addresses that problem directly, and solves it in a way that few other telecom
systems can. This is extremely disruptive technology, in large part because it is based
on concepts that have been proven time and time again: “the closed-source world can-
not win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders
of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.”
#
Open Architecture
One of the stumbling blocks of the traditional telecommunications industry has been
its apparent refusal to cooperate with itself. The big telecommunications giants have
all been around for over a hundred years. The concept of closed, proprietary systems
is so ingrained in their culture that even their attempts at standards compliancy are
tainted by their desire to get the jump on the competition, by adding that one feature
that no one else supports. For an example of this thinking, one simply has to look at
the VoIP products being offered by the telecom industry today. While they claim
standards compliance, the thought that you would actually expect to be able to connect
a Cisco phone to a Nortel switch, or that an Avaya voicemail system could be integrated
via IP to a Siemens PBX, is not one that bears discussing.
In the computer industry, things are different. Twenty years ago, if you bought an IBM
server, you needed an IBM network and IBM terminals to talk to it. Now, that IBM
server is likely to interconnect to Dell terminals though a Cisco network (and run Linux,
of all things). Anyone can easily think of thousands of variations on this theme. If any
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.
‖ From the perspective of the closed-source industry, their attitude is understandable. In his book The Mythical
Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley), Fred Brooks opined that “the complexity
and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done
only rises linearly.” Without a community-based development methodology, it is very difficult to deliver
products that at best are little more than incremental improvements over their predecessors, and at worst are
merely collections of patches.
#Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
The Promise of Open Source Telephony | 581