beelinebill May 30th, 2008
In case you missed it, Digium has launched it’s global online Asterisk Community on TMCNet at:
Look for expanding content from the Asterisk Ecosystem partners and Digium and stay current with Community happenings! You will find links to products, services, community, Astricon, case studies, developer information and if you have any suggestions, send us a note.
See you on the Asterisk Community!
kpfleming May 19th, 2008
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all the functionality of Zaptel 1.4, except for Linux kernel 2.4 support, devfs support, and drivers for some very outdated (and no longer available) Digium hardware (torisa and wcusb).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
beelinebill May 15th, 2008
I’ve been getting questions recently about changes in the Asterisk Community, specifically questions about Jared Smith and John Todd. Here’s the scoop:
Jared Smith, who came to Digium via the Sokol & Associates acquisition in July 2007, has accepted the position as Digium’s Training Manager. Jared has been Digium’s Community Relations Manager since joining Digium and is recognized globally as an Asterisk subject matter expert and is very well respected. We at Digium are thrilled to welcome Jared into this position.
John Todd has joined Digium as the Open Source Community Director. John has been an active Asterisk Community developer for 5 years and has contributed to the ecosystem growth by building and delivering Asterisk-based solutions for several companies — most recently as founder and CTO of TalkPlus, where he architected a high availability mobility solution. John will also play a key role in content development and delivery of Astricon (www.astricon.net) September 23-25, 2008. The Astricon event was originally created by Olle Johansson of Edvina and Steve Sokol in 2004 and is now under the Digium umbrella. John will be representing Digium in the community as Jared did, as well as working with the Asterisk Community to drive future strategies of open source Asterisk. Expect to see and hear more from John in the near future.
If you submitted a speaking proposal to Digium for Astricon, you will be hearing from John shortly. If you are interested in speaking, visit www.astricon.net and click on “Speaking Opportunities” on the left navigation bar. Abstracts will be accepted through June 1.
danny May 13th, 2008
Here’s the third installment from the Asterisk Myth Busters series. This one focuses on the dual missions of Digium and the company’s role in sponsoring the Asterisk Open Source Project.
MYTH: Digium is the benevolent sponsor and maintainer of the Asterisk project.
While benevolent has several similar meanings, one is “characterized by goodwill, intended for benefit rather than profit.” Digium currently funds approximately a dozen developers that work almost exclusively on the open source project, processed over 3000 issues in 2007 which resulted in almost 2000 commits to the open source project, and manages and funds a significant infrastructure which facilitates the Asterisk community and provides for maintaining the open source project (asterisk.org, bug tracker, mailing lists, web forums, etc), all of which provides no direct revenue – that all feels pretty benevolent to me.
However, the benevolent sponsorship of the Asterisk open source project is only half of Digium’s mission. The other half is a for-profit entity which hopes to grow and be profitable for their shareholders whose commercial mission is to create products and services that permit the whole world to benefit from Asterisk. Businesses with the in-house technical expertise to utilize the open source project may only need to purchase training to successfully utilize Asterisk – so we offer Asterisk training classes. Others may need hardware products to benefit from the open source project – so we, along with a number of other companies, most of whom do nothing to further the Asterisk project, offer hardware products designed specifically to work with Asterisk. However, a very large number of businesses do not have the in-house skill to utilize the open source project. For this segment of the market we offer pre-packaged solutions based upon the open source project that we sell as a turn-key product. As the for-profit side of Digium grows, so does the corresponding investment in the open source mission. Benevolence also relates to the way the company thinks about the future of the open source project. Using the philosophy of benevolence, Digium strives to make decisions regarding the open source mission that will enable open source Asterisk to be broadly adopted into numerous applications and many market segments across all geographies.
OUTCOME: Confirmed. While there are many individuals and organizations active in the Asterisk Ecosystem, Digium provides the resources to maintain the open source code base.