Undoubtedly, the software was firstly created mainly or even mostly by Mark Spencer of Digium (Find out more about the history of Asterisk here.). Having released Asterisk, Mark founded Digium. Here are some Asterisk’s purposes: – Provide Asterisk’s users with the useful equipment for traditional network. Despite the fact that modern “clean” IP telephony exchange software works only with SIP, Asterisk let users connect directly to analog and digital communication. And Digium designs all the implements to make it possible (you can upload the company’s index here). – Regulate the designing of Asterisk. After thousands of users and designers around the globe have become involved in the engineering and perfecting of the software, the company’s founders had to create a administered manageable open source community. Follow the link here to find out about the community http://bugs.digium.com. – Identify and pay for the strategic plan of Asterisk’s growth. Competent programmers working in the company make this possible to achieve. Furthermore, most of the professionals and programmers came from Asterisk’s forum. Their active work on the developing of the source code that already exists and creating a new code drew Asterisk’s administrators’ attention.

Digium gave away a part of its own tools to its dealers so that they could contact the software users directly. This allowed the company to examine planning the production. Besides, it didn’t have to deal with distributing its products. So, the company could concentrate on Asterisk’s growth.

Community forums The second fundamental element in the program advancement is users and designers’ social groups. The first Asterisk’s social group was open mailing lists which can be found here lists.digium.com. These lists’ growth is a must-know. In March 1999 only one person wrote to Asterisk community. In February and March 2002 the situation remained unchanged. In February 2003 (that is in a year) the mailing list consisted of about 600 messages. And in a year this amounted to 2700 messages while in February 2005 the list consisted of 5200 messages. Today public mailing lists lists.digium.com is like a street in the center of a city in rush hours where one can hardly move. Besides, one can literally drown in the flow of the information which fills lists.digium.com on the regular basis.

To relieve the public mailing lists Digium designed a new source (http://forums.digium.com) which is a new form of members’ collaboration and a new form of information sharing.

How can Asterisk software benefit from the communities?

By all means, the communions offer mutual assistance. Asterisk is a very invalueable and multifunctional system. New users who are literally drowned in the flow of the information and don’t know how to use it will think this quality to be a difficulty. And that’s where kind and well-intentioned group members could help. One can ask them directly about the way of achieving this or that particular aim. So, the communions play a useful role of a “big brother” helping new users to master the system.

In addition to the mentoring newbies, the communions have a meaningful influence on the improvement and development of Asterisk’s source code. Autonomous programmers using Asterisk in their companies together with Digium’s staff argue about the strategic development issues, design new tools and test the quality of the source code. If it were not for Asterisk’s forums, the company (i.e. Digium) would need much more resources for the system’s development.

Commercial partners Digium which owns Asterisk has the right to distribute the source code to other companies which can use Asterisk as the base for their own commercial applicants and products. Changing Asterisk so that it would satisfy their requirement, such companies often share parts of these codes with the community.

Technological partners Another element of Asterisk’s system is Digium’s technological partners who design innovative applicantions and tools. For example, as a result of Digium’s mutual cooperation with LumenVox, Asterisk got a new option of speech synthesis. Recently, Digium has been stated to collaborate with Skype which will result in a more effective Skype’s support (today Skype’s work is too dependable on the system’s performance).