The Digium Conundrum: Will Asterisk Be Just Another Asterisk on the VoIP Radar

It’s been several months since we last addressed the "Asterisk® Problem" and much has been written and spoken on the subject since then. In a nutshell, the problem is the code changes made in each new version of Asterisk which break existing business applications. We’ve come to a better appreciation of the point of view of some of the Asterisk developers. But I’m sorry to say they haven’t budged. The good news is that much has changed for the better in spite of the Asterisk developers. And today we wanted to share some of those developments with you.

The Developer Mentality. Suffice it to say that the Asterisk development community is quite small and mostly driven (like most programmers) by a fierce sense of independence. The puzzling part is that most of these guys (and it is an all-male club) work for companies that make their living in the Asterisk marketplace, either manufacturing or selling hardware for Asterisk-based telephony systems. For the most part, however, these companies are hardware peddlers rather than system integrators. One fact of life has become crystal clear. New versions and new beta releases NEVER break existing hardware. Why? Because these are the companies that feed these guys. "Whose bread I eat, his song I sing" goes the old adage. So hardware that was purchased in the Asterisk 1.2 days still works equally well with the latest 1.6 beta releases. Thank you very much.

Business application software for Asterisk is an altogether different equation. Here the developer mantra goes something like this. You’re using our code for free, and we’ll improve it in any way we think is best. If it breaks your application code, too damn bad! You can either fix it, stop using it, or go elsewhere. And we really don’t care which option you choose. The sad part of that mentality is a total lack of appreciation for the fact that, once demand for Asterisk systems in the business community dries up, the demand for Asterisk hardware will also take a nosedive.

The types of business applications that have been broken are major, not organization-specific. For example, Asterisk 1.4 broke the open source fax application. And Asterisk 1.6-beta broke both the open source and commercial text-to-speech (TTS) engines. The sad part is that the applications were broken by trivial code changes in Asterisk that just as easily could have been accomplished without breaking any application code.

This development approach, of course, keeps Asterisk out of most major corporations and government organizations even though it is an almost perfect fit for many of them. Why? It’s pretty simple. Business application software in most major organizations isn’t written in house. It’s developed by outside contractors who typically bid on a project, win the bid, develop the software application, and move on. Three to five years later, they usually are not around to rebuild something that the Asterisk developers have broken with their "improvements." Since phone systems usually are measured in decades and Asterisk releases are measured in years, it’s a pretty terrible fit for most major corporations and government organizations. Can you imagine a WalMart or a Hilton Hotel replacing their telephony applications every couple of years because all of their fax capability suddenly vanished? The same is equally true in the medical and legal communities as well as in major real estate and construction companies. Earth-to-Digium®: Companies have more to do than babysit their phone systems.

What we said four months ago is equally true today. When we began the PBX in a Flash project last November, our emphasis was radically different than some of the other Asterisk aggregations. First and foremost, we wanted a product that was stable. Of equal importance was our own Big Easy: easy to use, easy to enhance, and easy to upgrade. We didn’t want users or VARs having to reinvent the wheel each time a security patch or new enhancement was released. To look at it from the customer side, no business (that wants to stay in business) will tolerate a phone system that is routinely out of service for upgrades much less one that takes away features that the business depends upon. Whether it’s Caller ID, or Text-to-Speech, or Screen Pops, or Conferencing, or Phone Blasting, or even a Call Center really doesn’t matter. It does no good to tell a customer that they lost critical functionality but now they have the latest version of Asterisk. You can add your own customer expletive here if you’ve ever tried this approach in the real world.

In the good old days when there wasn’t much of a feature set and when no business would stake their livelihood on Asterisk, it really didn’t much matter when a new version of Asterisk was released. To put it charitably, things could only get better. But, businesses now rely upon Asterisk. So the dynamics are quite different. It’s no longer acceptable to trash big chunks of code without making certain that you didn’t break something that was already working. It’s no longer acceptable to invent new verbs in the programming language while deleting commands that used to work.

The Good News. There really is a silver lining to this story. There’s a new game in town: FreeSwitch. It may take a year, but this is an all new technology with a team of developers with an all new attitude about software development. This is a product that is being developed from the ground up to meet business needs. It employs modern, business interfaces with which most major organizations are already familiar. Can it do what Asterisk can do? For the 60% of Asterisk functions that already work, FreeSwitch not only gets a check mark but the performance improvement is staggering. And for the 60% of FreeSwitch functions that Asterisk can’t do at all… well, you’ll just have to try it. Give them six to twelve more months, and we predict the trickle of Asterisk defections is going to turn into a stampede. Both a Windows implementation for your desktop and a turnkey Linux install via ISO are now available. What’s still missing is a tool as simple as FreePBX to actually configure everything, but rumor has it that there are several GUI interfaces in the pipeline. And for the short term, nothing could be much simpler than the XML code that makes FreeSwitch tick. Indeed, dozens and dozens of sample XML scripts are already available which mirror most major Asterisk functions and dialplan applications.

And More Good News. The problem with breaking generic business applications is that the developers who initially wrote the open source apps are no longer around or interested in Asterisk. Wonder why? In any case, thanks to Antonio Gallo, open source faxing for Asterisk 1.4 is back. And, thanks to Darren Sessions, open source text-to-speech with Flite for Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 is a reality once again. Installation on CentOS systems still is a bit hairy. So we will include Flite for both Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 in our new PBX in a Flash 1.3 release next week. And faxing will return for Asterisk 1.4 in our first SUSHI update shortly thereafter. Enjoy!

Another Good Read: Open Source VoIP: Asterisk or FreeSwitch by David Greenfield

And Another: Asterisk vs. FreeSwitch by Anders Brownworth

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Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
 

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