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Asterisk renumbers open source VoIP

By Sean Michael Kerner on April 8, 2009 2:33 PM

From the 'what's in a version number?' files:

TORONTO. The open source Asterisk VoIP PBX is now at its 1.6.x release -- it's a number that Asterisk is going to stay at for a long time. That's the message that Kevin Fleming, Director of Software Technologies at Digium and co-maintainer of the Asterisk told attendess at the IT360 conference here in Toronto.

Instead of changing version numbers for each new feature based release, Fleming explained that Asterisk will now put new features into its 1.6.x point release.

Currently Asterisk is at the 1.6.0 release with the 1.6.1 release in beta.

"Up until Asterisk 1.6, the process was once new branch is out there are no new features in the branch just bug fixes," Fleming said. "That meant that if you had a new feature, it in might be a year or more till it showed up in production build. Now we do add features in between point releases."

As such the pace of innovation in Asterisk may well now accelerate since new point release come out every two to three months.

Fleming has been talking about 1.6 since at least 2007, which was the first time I saw him in Toronto. But it is only now that the 1.6 version of Asterisk is becoming the platform for the present and future of Asterisk.

Among the new features that are set to show up in the upcoming 1.6.1 versions of Asterisk are an automatic noise reduction technology and the new ChanSpy technlogy. ChanSpy let's PBX administrator listen in on calls for call center settings. Both new tech additions are taken from Digium's Switchvox acquisition., Digium is the lead commercial sponsor behind Asterisk.

Fundamentally though, Fleming boasted that Asterisk now does 95 percent of what people want to do with a PBX. He argued that Asterisk development now is mostly focused on performance and scalability.

"Basically everything is now a candidate for a 1.6.x release," Fleming said. "We're much like the Linux kernel in that way, we see no reason why we will need an Asterisk 1.8."

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