[asterisk-dev] Zaptel project being renamed to DAHDI

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Monday 19 May 2008 20:43:30 James Finstrom wrote:
> Anyway I too get 503

I'm not sure why it's not coming up for you, but here is the content:


Approximately two years ago, the owner of the trademark ‘Zaptel’ (for 
telephony purposes) contacted Digium and notified us that the name was in 
fact trademarked. His company owns the Zaptel trademark and sells telephone 
calling cards, and would prefer that Internet searches for ‘Zaptel cards’ not 
return products unrelated to their trademark.

In an effort to rectify this situation, since that time we have had many 
discussions internally at Digium about what we should do, including ensuring 
that any new name we chose would be something that was available to be 
trademarked (as Asterisk is), so that we wouldn’t have a recurrence of this 
situation. The owner of the trademark has been very accommodating as we 
worked through this process, but it is now time for us to take action.

Beginning immediately, we are going to work on renaming Zaptel to DAHDI, which 
stands for Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface. When DAHDI 2.0.0 (the 
first version) is released, it will contain nearly all the functionality of 
Zaptel 1.4, except for Linux kernel 2.4 support, devfs support, and drivers 
for some very outdated (and no longer available) Digium hardware (torisa and 
wcusb). Zaptel 1.2 will continue to be released in new versions as bugs are 
found and fixed, but when DAHDI 2.0.0 is released there will be no more 
releases of Zaptel 1.4.

Asterisk 1.6.0 will use DAHDI exclusively (it will not have support for 
Zaptel), although this will be done in a highly backwards-compatible way so 
that disruption to existing dialplans and configurations will be minimized.
Asterisk 1.4 will continue to have support for Zaptel, although it will be 
enhanced to also transparently support DAHDI instead, and the documentation 
(and default configuration files) will encourage new users to use DAHDI 
instead of Zaptel.

Asterisk 1.2 will be unaffected by these changes.

It is unfortunate that all of us have to bear the inconvenience of this 
change, but we will try to ensure that it is as easy for users to switch from 
Zaptel to DAHDI as we can make it.

For continuing updates on this process, including additional upgrade notes and 
other information, please monitor the page at:
http://www.asterisk.org/zaptel-to-dahdi

-- 
Tilghman