Disruptive Telephony

Wow!  Some big changes down in Alabama... per the news release yesterday (hat tip to Alec Saunders), Mark Spencer is changing roles within Digium and stepping aside as CEO to bring in ADTRAN's Danny Windham as the new CEO.  Mark will remain as Chairman and CTO of Digium.  They also announced a new worldwide VP of Sales.  Tom Keating has a good writeup of the announcement and also has a link to a podcast of the conference call announcing the changes.  It makes for good listening.

As noted, ADTRAN has had a long relationship with Digium... if I recall correctly, Mark started out as an intern there at ADTRAN and when he went on to launch Linux Support Services and needed a phone system, it was his background at ADTRAN that made him think that if he could just get telephony onto a PC, he could manipulate it.  Thus was born Asterisk.  (And then later Digium, the company, to support Asterisk.)

I'm glad for Mark to see the change.  I've come to know him a bit over the years through conferences/trade shows and the interviews we've done with him for Blue Box...  and he's definitely a hard-core techie and developer... he's done the CEO role because it's needed to be done, but his talents really are in the technology and I'm sure this role change will let him get more back into the technical stuff that is his passion.  Congrats, Mark!  You've certainly deserved it and I do wish you all the best.

It's a Friday afternoon... and so I thought I'd end the week with two videos I've been meaning to write about.  First up, Mark Spencer shows off their new AsteriskNow distribution:

So if you've never seen Mark Spencer, there he is.  AsteriskNow seems to be Digium's answer to Trixbox, now that Fonality purchased Trixbox and has been very actively promoting it.  (Trixbox, you may recall, was originally called "Asterisk@home".)  The idea is similar... package Asterisk and all other necessary components with a Linux distribution and provide a very simple GUI with wizards to install the whole thing.  Looks simple from the video... I'll have to try it out once I get vmware or something else running on one of my systems again.

I love it when I see the collision of a variety of my interests.  Here O'Reilly combines VoIP, open source and social media (a wiki in this case) all in one effort: Bruce Stewart is looking for people to "Help Create the Asterisk Cookbook".  Here's his request:

We’re looking for two kinds of contributions. First, we’re looking for problems you’d like to see solved in the book. If you need to make Asterisk do something and just can’t figure out how, let us know. We’ll try to solve the problem for you. Second, we’re looking for more advanced Asterisk users to contribute solutions to problems that they’ve faced.

And Bruce has a wiki set up for people to use to contribute.  This is interesting on a couple of different levels.  First, it's a major publisher going out to a community to directly involve them in writing a book. Second, they are using a wiki for all the collaboration. (And yes, other authors have reached out to communities and have used wikis for public collaboration, so this isn't necessarily a new idea.)  And third, the topic being Asterisk, I'm sure they'll wind up getting recipes from a ton of people who have scratched their various itches and solved peculiar problems using Asterisk.  In fact, it will probably could have been titled "The Itch-Scratcher's Guide to VoIP."

I'll be intrigued to see the result, not only of how the collaborative process works for O'Reilly, but also for the actual book.  The fascinating and fun part about Asterisk is that because the code is wide open for anyone to tweak to their heart's content, people can scratch itches and solve problems that are so particular to them that no commercial vendor in their right mind would ever spend the time or resources to address the issue. There's just no real market for it beyond that one company/organization. But that entity can turn to Asterisk and either program it themselves or pay someone to develop the feature or fix for them.  If they make their code public, it might just turn out that there are some others out there who might have the same or a similar itch.  And the itch-scratching continues...

So it will be fun to see what recipes emerge.