[asterisk-dev] Asterisk and distributions (Debian, Fedora, etc)

[Daniel Pocock]

On 14/11/12 21:18, Olle E. Johansson wrote:
> 
> 14 nov 2012 kl. 21:10 skrev Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us>:
> 
>> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Paul Belanger <paul.belanger at polybeacon.com> wrote:
>> On 12-11-14 12:02 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>>
>>
>> Following up from the SIP stack discussion, I think it may be useful to
>> have a separate thread to get comments from people about the
>> relationship of Asterisk with distributions.
>>
>> I'm the Asterisk packager for Fedora.  I do the packaging work on my free time, I do not work for Digium or RedHat and my current employer does not pay me to do the packaging either, although having Asterisk packaged for Fedora certainly comes in handy at work.
> 
> Thank you, Jeffrey!
> 


There is one further observation that I should have mentioned before:
for SIP to really take off, it needs a solid body of SIP users out
there.  The more people there are running public SIP infrastructure, the
more people will need it.  Eventually it will become a must-have, just
like every company needs an SMTP gateway.

I really believe that the availability of mail servers in early Debian,
Redhat and Slackware systems were a major factor in the early explosion
of email deployments.  Having SIP/VoIP packages available the same way
is necessary for it to catch on.

Providing that we do invest in packaging, shared libraries and all that
goes into making these high quality distributions, I feel that it will
actually pay off in the future by increasing the number of bespoke
projects that come along.  Larger enterprises will invest more heavily
in a communications technology if there is a large pool of other
businesses (of all sizes) that they can interact with.  Distributions
create that foundation.