Asterisk Open Source PBX 1.0 Release

An anonymous reader writes "Today at Astricon (the first Asterisk conference), Mark Spencer announced the release of version 1.0.0 of Asterisk. For those of you that don't know: Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. Asterisk users can be up and running, making phone calls in under an hour using the various guides found at the VoIP Wiki. Connectivity to the PSTN is provided by companies like VoicePulse, Nufone, Gafachi and VoipJet."

Comments

Re:Slashdot News

[erick99]

As far as I can tell from the article and their website, this software is free so I don't see how this is advertising. At least not in the traditional sense of advertising to make money from selling a product or service.

Don't you think you are being a bit hypocritical complaining about advertising when you are trolling for referrals for your free iPod? Now that is an example of advertising for a profit. If the shoe fits....

-erick

best and worst of open source

[MrShoop]

Asterisk exemplifies the best and worst elements of an open source project. The best being this is an awesomely powerful, infinitely configurable robust piece of software that is free and can replace otherwise extremely expensive proprietary systems. It is power to the masses in that a small company can have a comparable phone system to a big corporation that spends tens of thousands of dollars.

The worst is that there is a very steep learning curve. Configuration of both hardware and software is complex. While the documentation is thorough, it is not oriented towards the first time set-up.

Taken as a whole, though the good outweighs the bad, and it is worth investing in learning about it. This is great package. Tanks to the people who have been working on it, esp Mark at Digium.

Re:best and worst of open source

[Scott Laird]

In many ways, Asterisk reminds me of Sendmail, circa 1996 or so. It's complex, it's sort of hard to configure (although Asterisk doesn't use line noise for config files, unlike Sendmail), but it's insanely flexible. In the early and mid 90s, you needed the flexibility, because email standards were in flux. SMTP was common, but so was UUCP and BITNET and a handful of other protocols. Gateways into non-RFC822 systems were all over the place. You needed a mail program that could handle all sorts of weird issues or you'd never be able to hack together a config that could handle your weird mail needs.

Asterisk is similar. It's complex because it's designed to be able to tie together clumps of incompatible phone systems and act in all sorts of ways that the programmers didn't really intend. You can use it as a pure VoIP system, a gateway between different VoIP systems, a plain PBX with analog phones, a VoIP extension for an existing PBX, a voice-mail system for a PBX, a dialer for a call center, or a centrex-style virtual PBX for multiple companies. It's flexible enough to let you configure it to be any of these and a thousand other things. And today, we need the flexibility because we have so many weird little phone systems that we need to tie together.

For email, things eventually changed. SMTP is king, and RFC 822 is the gold standard for email formats. Modern mailers are a lot less complex because they *CAN* be. Will the future hold something similar for telephone service? Who knows. Check back in a decade, but for now, use Asterisk.

cheap, turnkey asterisk systems?

[timothy]

I know at least one technically skilled computer programmer type (ruling me out on two counts) who had a lot of pain setting up asterics. (Brian will remain completely anonymous.)

Considering the ludicrous (low) prices for which one can buy a complete system far-more-than-capable of running asterics, the relatively cheap price of the phone interfaces, etc, it seems like a plentifully adequate Asterics box could be made for a lot less than $500, and perhaps sold for that amount (just one or two lines, more could cost more). This isn't *dirt* cheap like future, hypothetical home PBX appliances ought to be from Linksys and similar companies, but considering you can also use it as a home server and other things on the side, strikes me as at least a plausible, reasonable price to aim for.

Has anyone done this? Does anyone sell a shoe-box PBX for a few hundred dollars that can be accessed via web, so new voice messages and menus can be dropped in via clicky-clicky drop-down menus?

On this front, Isaac from MythTV and Marc from Asterics should get together and forge an unholy alliance, integrating two home-automation tasks in a nice, non-monolithic, package. I noticed that MythTV has *some* kind of new addition involving phones, but I have not read the linked bits yet ;)

timothy