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It's amazing this project is still alive and kicking. Back in the day, early 2000s, I was employed by Takeaway.com to automate a large part of their outbound ca

It's amazing this project is still alive and kicking. Back in the day, early 2000s, I was employed by Takeaway.com to automate a large part of their outbound callcenter work (after faxing an order for a Pizza, sometimes an error occurred due to paper jam etc and our callcenter had to verify the order arrived). As this was way before the day of Twilio, Asterisk allowed us to completely automate that process, thus reducing the work of our callcenter tremendously. I can only assume they use a service like Twilio for this nowadays, but they were fun times, it allowed us to save incredible amounts of money, and is a good example of how opensource software helps small businesses in their early phase.

deleted 7y ago
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rstuart4133 7y ago
> It's amazing this project is still alive and kicking. It's not really amazing. It's the OpenWRT of phone systems. There are lots of commercial PABX systems out there that are Asterisk with a skin. VOIP providers often use if for instance. It's "dial plan", which I guess was originally a list of phone number patterns mapping to instructions one how to handle them, grew into a fully fledged but absolutely horrid language, complete with function calls, variables, and macros and threads of execution. The addition of IAX, which is effectively a protocol that lets a dial plan running in one copy of Asterisk invoke functions in another dial plan running in another copy let you build distributed PABX's. From a computer science language design perspective the this conglomerate of organically added features is truly ghastly. But that doesn't matter. What matters is it does allow you to build amazingly complex that can deliver any feature you care to name. I've built systems that with over 20 instances of Asterisk, most with no external SIP lines of their own, that to the users functions like a single PABX in the cloud. All the calls are logged to a central place so the organisation can track who is doing what. None of this requires stepping outside of Asterisk provides in the box. When you have a system that powerful and flexible, and yet bloody horrible to configure, it's not surprising lots of 3rd parties base their own products on it. I have absolutely no doubt those 3rd parties would not let Asterisk die. They must know, understand and appreciate the power of the open source model, so if the current project died some of them would stand up and fork a replacement.

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rstuart4133 7y ago

> It's amazing this project is still alive and kicking. It's not really amazing. It's the OpenWRT of phone systems. There are lots of commercial PABX systems out there that are Asterisk with a skin. VOIP providers often use if for instance. It's "dial plan", which I guess was originally a list of phone number patterns mapping to instructions one how to handle them, grew into a fully fledged but absolutely horrid language, complete with function calls, variables, and macros and threads of execution. The addition of IAX, which is effectively a protocol that lets a dial plan running in one copy of Asterisk invoke functions in another dial plan running in another copy let you build distributed PABX's. From a computer science language design perspective the this conglomerate of organically added features is truly ghastly. But that doesn't matter. What matters is it does allow you to build amazingly complex that can deliver any feature you care to name. I've built systems that with over 20 instances of Asterisk, most with no external SIP lines of their own, that to the users functions like a single PABX in the cloud. All the calls are logged to a central place so the organisation can track who is doing what. None of this requires stepping outside of Asterisk provides in the box. When you have a system that powerful and flexible, and yet bloody horrible to configure, it's not surprising lots of 3rd parties base their own products on it. I have absolutely no doubt those 3rd parties would not let Asterisk die. They must know, understand and appreciate the power of the open source model, so if the current project died some of them would stand up and fork a replacement.