Asterisk Developer Community Growth
Did you ever wonder when Mark Spencer created his first version of Asterisk? Or the number of people actually contributing code actively to Asterisk, the PBX platform that have had such a great impact on how we communicate not to mention the dwindling prices we pay for the means needed to do this? Some time ago I prepared one of my posts on this Blog, and I spent a considerable amount of time looking for the right answers. No need to do that again, Russel Bryant just gave us the whole story. If you find it interesting please visit his Blog, you find the link at the bottom of this post.
Asterisk trunk is the main development branch for Asterisk. This is where we are preparing the newest changes for the next major release. For example, new features that go into Asterisk trunk today will be first available in Asterisk 1.8 (wait, what?! 1.8?! Yeah, yeah. I’ll get back to that in a bit!) Asterisk trunk stays very busy. Here are some measurements regarding activity in trunk over the last year:
- 2320 commits
- 825 files changed
- 322148 Lines of code added
- 53251 Lines of code removed
A lot of people contribute to Asterisk. Among those writing code for Asterisk, there is a select group that has direct access to make changes to the source (committers). At the beginning of the project, there was effectively one committer, Mark Spencer. As the project has grown, we have worked very hard at scaling our development community such that we can process more code. The number of committers today is over 50 (with the number of contributors much higher than that).
In order to contribute code to Asterisk you will have to sign an agreement with Digium, and so far over 800 people have signed up to contribute to Asterisk over the past couple of years.
The history of Asterisk releases begins 10 years ago. Here are some dates on releases during the first half of the project’s lifetime:
- 0.1 – December 1999
- 0.2 – September 2002
- 0.3 – February 2003
- 0.4 – April 2003
- 0.5 – September 2003
- 0.7 – January 2004
- 0.9 – April 2004
If you’re reading this and have been using Asterisk long enough to remember these releases, cool! That means you were involved in the project longer than me. I got involved in the Asterisk project in the middle of 2004. By the first Astricon in the Fall of 2004, Mark Spencer decided to release Asterisk 1.0 and asked me to maintain it.
- Asterisk 1.0
- Fall of 2004
- Regular 1.0.X updates with bug fixes only
- Eventually went into security only maintenance, and is no longer maintained today
Asterisk development continued and over the next couple of years and we released Asterisk 1.2 and Asterisk 1.4. We made some changes to development processes regarding how and when to port bug fixes and how they were merged between releases. However, the release policies regarding what went into updates and roughly how often they were released didn’t change.
- Asterisk 1.2
- Released November of 2005
- Still updated with security fixes only
- Asterisk 1.4
- Released December of 2006
- Still fully maintained
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