Brian Robinson asked, “What’s So Great About Asterisk?” What makes Asterisk so great is the fact that Mark Spencer released his code into the GPL, which sparked the creation of a dedicated community of contributors who continually strive to make Asterisk more complete and reliable. Then Digium’s relentless push to improve Asterisk has ensured continued success. After all, free software really isn’t without cost, as many presume.

Asterisk is a powerful toolkit for those that are motivated enough to leverage its power. Asterisk in itself is not and may never become a finished product by any means. Those who elect to deploy their own ‘plain’ Asterisk solution need to be completely self-motivated and willing to not necessarily have anyone else to solve the inevitable problem or road block.

Those poised to benefit the most because of Asterisk are those innovative integrators, application and service providers who build the necessary policies, systems and software around Asterisk to add value to the ‘free’ software for those that are not motivated or willing to deploy their own plain version of Asterisk.

Solutions like AsteriskNOW and SwitchVOX have made significant progress, but are not yet considered Enterprise quality.

Intel, Sun, Cisco and other major industry players are currently evaluating what they can do with Asterisk. This will continue to drive more resources and custom, targeted solutions to make the adoption of Asterisk-based solutions that much easier for everyone.

Now there are a minority of dissenters out there that claim Digium could stop contributing code and release a proprietary version of Asterisk. Technically there is nothing stopping Digium, but creating a proprietary version of Asterisk would most certainly kill their business, allowing someone else to take their place as the majority contributor to Asterisk. Remember Asterisk was released into the GPL, nobody not even Mark himself can take it back.

I truly believe that Digium has and will continue to completely embrace the Open Source concept and one day Asterisk will be considered a serious player in the PBX marketplace. Until that day, those early adopters and custom integrators will continue to drive exposure, revenue and relevance into and around the Asterisk phenomenon.

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