[asterisk-users] Recent additions to the Digium Asteriskdevelopment team

[Barzilai]

I like the gumball analogy.
I'm more awake today. I wasn't complaining last night, I was just 
stating my criticism in an emphatic way :-)

As you say, Mark & Co just started writing a little soft PBX system to 
"scratch their own itches" at the time.
Mark was so kind as to share it with the rest. The fact that it grew so 
wildly fast (and made them very rich) shows that there was a GREAT NEED 
for something like this.  The other side of the coin is that there's a 
risk of becoming a Frankenstein system with lots of ugly patches and 
configuration syntaxes with small variations and basically lines upon 
lines of code where everybody adds something to scratch their own itch 
in their own particular manner.

And 90% of Asterisk users like it. Probably they just want a quick and 
dirty PBX to make cheap long distance calls over VoIP and a few 
extensions within their company.

I'm not sure what improvements version 1.4 will bring (except for 
having  graduated AEL2 into the "real AEL") but being a 1.x version it 
can't bring architectural changes. I haven't looked at the code but I'm 
sure it will be much better.

I checked out OpenPBX again today. They seem to have started with a lot 
of enthusiasm and good ideas but they are going very slowly and I'm not 
sure they are differing much from Asterisk's architecture after all.
I also took a look at Freeswitch. Now, here's a guy who knows software 
engineering!!! I'm afraid it's still too new and featureless to be of 
any competence to Asterisk... but who knows in a few months...

I'd love to help with the coding but at the moment I'm too busy... I 
wish I were like that X-Men guy who replicates himself, then my third 
clone would be the Asterisk clone!

BarZ

Michael Collins wrote:
>>  Asterisk is what you make of it. If you don't want certain
>> applications to run on a certain instance/machine then you should
>> "noload" them in modules.conf.
>>     
>
>
> Barzilai still has a point.  Noloading various applications doesn't
> address the underlying architectural issues.  The fact of the matter is
> that Asterisk has grown quickly and therefore many features have been
> attached like the proverbial gumball getting bigger and bigger.  
>
> The improvements from 1.0.x to 1.2.x were significant and hopefully the
> jump to 1.4.x will be equally significant.  However, the needs that
> Asterisk fills today are broader and more complex than they were just a
> few years ago.  It was impossible for Mark & Co. to predict everything
> that Asterisk could possibly do, so they couldn't necessarily engineer
> the system with all of those things in mind.  Now that we have several
> years' experience and thousands of Asterisk systems in production there
> is a clearer picture of the needs to be fulfilled - the "itches" that
> Asterisk scratches, as the TFOT book puts it.  
>
> I for one hope that Asterisk 2.0 isn't too far off in the future.  I'd
> love to see it redesigned and re-engineered from the ground up, taking
> into consideration the many years of experience garnered by the Asterisk
> community.  (Disclaimer: this is NOT a complaint!  I love Asterisk and I
> just want it to be even better than it already is.)
>
> Having new development team members is definitely a good thing.  I'm
> looking forward to 1.4 and more.
>
> -MC  
>