The impact of what mark spencer has done single handedly ( afaik he hacked the original version in C by himself over a couple of months) is freaking huge. I wou

The impact of what mark spencer has done single handedly ( afaik he hacked the original version in C by himself over a couple of months) is freaking huge. I would rank his to be the second biggest contribution to open source, just after linux. I have been personally testament to the havoc that this disruptive piece of code has wreaked in the telecommunications business. I worked as an angel member in my previous startup, where we built software used to handle the call dialling and management in call centres. Also known as a 'dailer',the software has a huge market in India as it is central to operating any call centre. Before we got in, the space was dominated by players like Avaya, who used to lug around with their huge expensive pieces of hardware (used to manage the real time routing and call logging). Asterisk changed all of it and made possible for small startups to enter the fray. Proprietary and expenseive hardware solutions are now all but extinct in the small to medium call centre space and softwares driven by Asterisk rule the roost. Distributed systems running on Astersisk are now slowly challenging the last bastion of expensive hardware telephony systems - the big call centre market. Unlike the OS business, free and open source is definitely set on winning this game - and it all began by one hacker wanting to test the limits of some lean, mean and pointer-ridden C code..