[asterisk-announce] The Evolution of Asterisk (or: How We Arrived at Asterisk 10)

[Kevin P. Fleming]

We are fast approaching the seven-year anniversary of the release of 
Asterisk 1.0.0, which occurred at the first AstriCon in September, 2004. 
If you look back a little further, there were various “0.x” releases 
made as early as December of 1999… my, how time has flown!

We’ve had quite a few ‘major’ releases of Asterisk since then, including 
1.2, 1.4, and most recently, 1.8. Each of these releases has included 
significant changes, and sometimes architecture-improving changes. Each 
of them has also included substantial new functionality for Asterisk 
users. Along the way, we’ve been asked by many people in the community 
when we are going to start working on (or release) “Asterisk 2.0.” 
Typically, we’ve responded by saying that will not happen until we can 
really justify such a significant change in the version number. Many 
open source projects have gone through similar progressions, and quite a 
number of them have in fact undergone complete (or nearly complete) 
rewrites resulting in new ‘major’ versions.

The Asterisk project, however, has tried to avoid that level of 
disruption to its users. Instead we’ve focused on attempting to provide 
as much backwards compatibility between major releases as we could. As a 
result, each time we’ve released a new major version, the decision has 
been made that “No, this isn’t Asterisk 2.0,” and we’ve continued with 
the version numbering scheme that Mark Spencer started all those years ago.

Over the past few months though, as we’ve approached the first beta 
release of the next major version of Asterisk, we’ve been having a 
somewhat unexpected conversation: about just how different this release 
is going to be from the releases that most users in the community are 
using on their production Asterisk systems (primarily Asterisk 1.4, 
although there are still a lot of 1.2 users as well).

In fact, even though it’s been an evolutionary process, not a 
revolutionary one, the next major Asterisk release really will be 
substantially different from Asterisk 1.4 in some very noticeable ways: 
wideband conferencing support, basic video conferencing support, support 
for a number of additional VoIP technologies, full-fledged FAX support, 
and many others.

That has raised the question: Is this Asterisk 2.0? If not, will there 
ever be an Asterisk 2.0? After quite a lot of discussion, we came to the 
conclusion that this is not Asterisk 2.0, but that it’s also quite 
unlikely that there ever will be such a release; it wouldn’t be in the 
community’s best interests to release something that is fundamentally 
different (and not compatible) but still call it ‘Asterisk.’  That then 
leaves the question we’ve been asked by many people: If there’s never 
going to be an Asterisk 2.0, why continue to call these releases “1.x”? 
What does the “1″ mean, if it’s never going to change?

The conclusion that we’ve reached, and that we hope you’ll agree with, 
is that Asterisk is always going to be Asterisk, and that you don’t need 
a “1.” prefix on the version number to be able to identify it. So, 
starting with the next major release, we’re going to drop the “1.” 
completely. The next major release, which was going to be Asterisk 1.10, 
will now be just “Asterisk 10″ and subsequent major releases will be 
“Asterisk 11″, “Asterisk 12″, and so forth.

We’ll continue with our plan to have both standard and long-term support 
releases of Asterisk, and we’ll update the Asterisk Project Wiki with 
this information as soon as the first Asterisk 10 beta goes out. In 
fact, this should occur very soon.

As always, thanks to everyone for their continued support of Asterisk. 
That especially includes the developer community, the people that find 
and report issues, the people that help test patches and the people that 
devote their time to answering questions on IRC channels, the mailing 
lists and the forums.  We hope to see everyone trying out the 
forthcoming beta, and we look forward to seeing you all at AstriCon 2011!
-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming at digium.com | SIP: kpfleming at digium.com | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org