I've been noticing a pattern in the free-software world. Product A becomes a flagship implementation of something. Sendmail for smtp, Apache for http and so on. These are early implementors, lots of people get behind the project, a hundred different paths are taken. In the mean-time there are lots of experimenting, tweaking, and reworking to the entire suite/stack for that something, which get rolled into the original implementation. This results in a giant, lumbering beast of an application. It contains this collective history of the entire movement. All the abortive bits, blind alleys, weird idiosyncracies must be kept, because someone, somewhere depends on it.<p>All the old timers think this is the bee's knees. Everyone else however gets sick of the giant, and you get exim or nginx, in a hundred varieties that perform better for certain common (or uncommon) subsets of use. These better performing "lightweight" versions shed the cruft and are widely adopted by those who no longer care about say, http servers, and instead just want a simple strut.<p>Anyway my point is: is it at all surprising that FreeSWITCH has come in to do fill the Asterisk role as a voip strut?
I'm not surprised.<p>I've been an Asterisk user, Admin and Coder since 2003 Asterisk's internals has some issues to be truly concerned about. The MOST concerning part is the attitude of the community-- it's not longer a fun loving open source community but more of a "How can I make more money from this?" At least that's my opinion and experience while trying to hammer out some changes to chan_sip this last month.
I'm quite interested in getting into the business of switching local small businesses from proprietary PBX systems to open VoIP hardware. Anyone got some tips for getting into the field? I'm a competent programmer and system admin but my but I have little knowledge of telephony.<p>BTW, my impression of Asterisk vs Freeswitch matches the article. Asterisk is pretty ugly in terms of implementation and configuration. However, at this point Asterisk has much more (still small) traction in the marketplace.