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Asterisk 10 - The Inside Story

[October 27, 2011]

Asterisk 10 - The Inside Story

Originally posted on VoIP & Gadgets Blog, here: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/asterisk-10---the-inside-story.asp.

At AstriCon, I sat down with Digium's Steve Sokol, Asterisk Marketing Director, to discuss the big Asterisk 10 release. It's quite the version leap from 1.1, 1.2, 1.4 , 1.6, to 1.8 - and now to 10.0. Ironically, I knocked Asterisk's small version increments when I spoke with Mark Spencer 1-3 years ago. I asked Mark why the version numbering scheme was still less than 2.0. To me it seemed like Mark was rebelling against the typical software companies (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.), which release a major new version number pretty quickly.

I personally think Mark and his developer team wore their low numbering scheme as a badge of honor. Developers are all about adding more features, but more importantly under-promising and over-delivering to their users. Marketing and executives on the other hand are all about over-promising. Though you could argue Steve Jobs, an executive "got it" and had a habit of "surprising" users during his keynotes with some newfangled product or feature. I half expected that Asterisk would be on version 1.9999 in the year 2025 and keep adding 9s just to stay under v2.0!

I recall Mark saying something to the effect that Digium didn't want to simply increment the major release number (1st digit) for the sake of having a higher version number. I remember he wanted to be very conservative in the version numbering scheme. Mark's background is as a developer, so he probably gets annoyed by other companies that release a major new version number only to find 5 minor new feature added in. It fills the companies' coffers, but can annoy the user base. Digium has always tried to put the Asterisk community first. Sure, they (Digium) want to make a profit, but they also don't want to sell their soul to get there. Still, I didn't necessarily agree with Mark on his conservative number scheme, but I understood and admire his rebellious thinking and his moxy.