Most of my time at the computer today is spent catching up on Asterisk developments. In my day job, Avaya maintains the phone switch, an "old reliable" system called Legend (associated with Merlin, Bell, Lucent, and now Avaya). For the recent change on daylight savings time, Avaya was perfectly willing to program the switch for us for a minimum price of $250. I ended up doing it myself and it took me about 15 minutes.
Asterisk, by contrast, is a completely open phone switch. You can see all the source code, you can compile it yourself, you can maintain it yourself. You just have to know what you are doing. The difference is astounding because once you're freed from the limitations of outrageous support fees, the sky's the limit.
All that's really needed to complete the system is to make the interface a great deal less user hostile. User friendly this is not. But there's hope, Asterisk is coming to the Macintosh platform. I expect that by 2008, things will be much better.
Posted by TMLutas at March 24, 2007 07:19 PM