Asterisk PBX changed the way teleco viewed Linux and Open Source. Things may never be the same. Created in 1999, Asterisk PBX is widely considered the first Open Source PBX to run on commodity hardware. Mark Spencer initially wrote Asterisk because his start-up needed a PBX and he didn’t want to put capital into an expensive phone system. While initially created to solve an in-house problem, it has since evolved into a company, Digium’with Spencer as its president’earning $10 million in yearly revenue and a respected PBX capable of scaling from small-to-large enterprise deployments as well as handling carrier-grade applications.
Link: Linux Magazine
