Sounds like a recent rumor I heard from a close source a while back was true. Mark Spencer, founder and creator of Asterisk and CEO of Digium is moving aside to become the CTO according to Jeremy McNamara’s blog post. That’s not at all surprising given their recent investment from Matrix Partners. The rumor was the past several months have been painful as David Skok was urging him to bring in some top talent to turn the open source project into a real business. Given David’s recent involvement in the acquisition of JBoss by RedHat, I’m sure he’s following a specific game plan. However, Mark was fighting this and a number of top JBoss executives and key developers have been rumored to interview with Mark – with no success and all being left with the feeling of “amateur hour” – and an ego much worse than the famous Marc Fleury. And that’s pretty bad.
The technology of Asterisk has a lot of potential and is shaking up the telecommunications space. However, in my opinion and based on experience, it’s currently a big blob of crap and needs a lot of professional development help. Unlike JBoss, Asterisk is truely a hack. JBoss, like any open source project that has many developers working on it, also has its own set of issues – but I must say that for all the core people that have and continue to work on open source: they are professional and very good developers and architects. JBoss has a discipline for working hard to make it work with high quality. You might disagree with their approach, their implementation or even their cause – but if you understand the product and code well enough as I do, you have to agree it’s top notch.
Dig through the Asterisk code base. Oh my. Not only is it completely unmanageable and unreadable (partly because it’s put together using archaic C programming language) – it’s also wraught with memory leaks, crashes and just completely hacked out logic and patches. I’m sure they’re working hard to turn it into a real professional open source product, but they have a long way to go.
And what’s up with the new CEO – Danny Windham – from Adtran? OK, I get the parallels to the Digium board business, but c’mon. Adtran, the manufacturer of network access products like CSUs and Muxes? I’m not sure Adtran even knows what SIP is these days, nevertheless open source. Don’t get me wrong, they make decent products for that sector. But I guess David couldn’t find anybody good enough to go to Alabama to build an open source company. Hopefully, though, Danny will bring some level of professionalism and business to the Asterisk project and turn it into a real product. I think that would be good for everyone.
technorati tags: asterisk, digium, adtran, markspencer, sip, opensource
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