OStatic

When it comes to open source telephony software, Asterisk has one of the longest, most illustrious backgrounds in the market. There's been a nagging issue that's been holding Asterisk back, however, especially in larger enterprises -- a lack of professional support. Digium, the corporate entity that sponsors Asterisk, began offering tiered subscription support services through its storefront this week.

Just as it has been for the previous ten years, the Asterisk telephony engine and toolkit is available for download (free of charge, licensed under the GPL) with support, advice, and discussion offered through the community forums. The subscription support plans are designed to complement the community-driven efforts while giving enterprises the option to call upon dedicated experts to help with deployment, maintenance and training.

April is fast approaching, and that can mean only one thing -- the jackalopes have returned from wherever it is that jackalopes overwinter, and they're making their way to mirrors and torrents near you. The alpha stage of the Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) release is now behind us, and the first beta version was sighted on mirrors worldwide just moments ago.

While the world won't see the official Jackalope release until April 23rd, the Ubuntu team invites any interested in Jackalope (bug) hunting to download the beta version and join the party.

Recently, the KDE Project has put a concerted effort into improving the community experience. In October, Lisa covered the relaunch of the KDE Forums, while new real world events such as Camp KDE and the upcoming joint Akademy/GUADEC Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria gives KDE fans a chance to meet in person.

The KDE team recently announced the KDE Brainstorm initiative. KDE Brainstorm, in practice, works much like Dell's IdeaStorm -- community members of all walks of life are invited to chip in their ideas for new and improved features and functions, with the wider community voting on (and fleshing out) these ideas. Ideas that generate enough interest are then reviewed further by developers, who work to make them happen.

This week, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit began accepting proposals for its upcoming event. The event, aimed at encouraging interaction between KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC developer conference attendees, gives prospective speakers the opportunity to bring their passion to a more diverse audience.

Esther Schindler at the Linux Foundation Developer Network offers some insightful analysis on developer career choices -- is it easier to find employment and make a living working in a proprietary or open source development environment?

Schindler explains that while gathering data on the number of available jobs in these fields is challenging (and determining the number of qualified candidates competing for them is moreso), looking closely at job search sites, recruiter information, and career statistics indicate that a career in open source development can be even more lucrative than one in a proprietary setting.

The Linux Foundation and Sourceforge have joined forces to rebuild a community on the prime web real estate known as Linux.com.

In its former life, Linux.com featured a mix of unique content and aggregated stories from the wider Linux community. While it hosted forums and allowed reader comments, it wasn't fully collaborative. Late last year, Linux.com ceased updating the aggregated stories, and at the start of 2009, announced that the original content was also coming to an end, but that other (bigger) plans were afoot. The old Linux.com forum software then replaced the articles on the main page, and many were left puzzled about where on earth this rather memorable domain was headed.

The Linux Foundation and Sourceforge have put the transformation in motion -- but where the domain is headed is very much up to the Linux community. Linux developers and users alike are invited to give their thoughts on the IdeaForge on Linux.com.