When Mark Spencer was starting a Linux company six years ago, he had $4,000 and some cheap, leftover hardware from a company where he had interned during college. His first conundrum: How were customers going to call him? A private branch exchange -- the specialized hardware that routes calls around an office -- was going to set him back $6,000.
So Spencer decided to program his own Linux-based PBX. "Telecom was not really our core business," he says. But he released the software as open-source, and as contributions of code started coming in, Asterisk was born. Today, his company, now called Digium, focuses entirely on developing Asterisk and selling related hardware and software. He won't disclose the revenue of his closely held company, but he says it is profitable.
The success of Asterisk shows the growing power of open-source. Digium could have tried to roll out its own proprietary PBX -- and likely would have been crushed by the likes of Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel. But by sharing his code, Spencer has created an ecosystem full of niches waiting to be filled. That should keep his phones ringing for quite a while.
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