[VoIP] Asterisk vs. others

[David Josephson]

The Asterisk community seems driven now by people who are focused on 
database and accounting features for call centers, robodialers and other 
applications where dropped calls or audio glitches aren't the end of the 
world. It's my impression, after talking with some people at VON and 
others, that Mark Spencer and Digium are doing a great job, but clearly 
would like to drive people to buy their hardware, and if possible to get 
the open source horse back into the barn with various proprietary 
extensions of *. There are other projects out there in open source land, 
such as SER, YATE (yet another telephony engine) and openpbx.

Openpbx has changed its name to Callweaver and seems to be picking up 
speed. It is a fork of Asterisk 1.2 and claims to be fixing some of the 
basic call quality issues in zaptel; maybe they will get to libpri soon, 
which two vendors told me was "broken."

Has anyone played with these other systems?