Ah, no, not exactly. Nowadays the larger Open Source projects all have corporate sponsors. The Linux Foundation for example spends around $200M a year and .5M a year on Linus Torvald’s salary.
The reality is that the Asterisk project went to this model many years ago with Sangoma as the sponsor and its developers do, in fact, exert very significant control over the code. Anyone in the community contributing sort of makes a deal with the devil when they contribute since while the corporate sponsors pay the bills for keeping the lights on, the projects do go towards what those sponsors want. Not ALL development is from the developers paid by those sponsors but project control absolutely is. So - the community CAN contribute - if they want - but their contributions may not, actually, be incorporated in the project - and may in fact be rejected - and scorned by other contributors.
The Gen 10 Proliant is one of many Intel-based servers and Sangoma’s Switchvox product runs on Intel-based CPUs - so no, actually, I don’t have to worry about that part of it, since Switchvox customers are paying for that development. And some of their customers are other businesses (like Grandstream) who pay source license fees to them for Asterisk.
However, I AM one of those chan_sip users and I DID make a contribution to keep that alive. It was a contribution that was, in fact, kept at arm’s length by the Asterisk project. They don’t exactly know what to do with it.
The same thing happened with Dave Burgess (formerly cjnut) who did a lot to contribute towards the development of chan_sccp with the sccp-b development. Once more, the Asterisk project kept that at arm’s length. He’s passed a few years ago but I did contribute a guide for installing that on FreePBX as a proof that it could be installed on Asterisk version 22 - mainly to shut up several ignoramuses on those forums who claimed otherwise.
chan_sip on the other hand, has fared better. Despite Sangoma’s rejection of incorporating that into Asterisk itself, it’s still out there and there’s 2 forks of it that can be reintegrated into the Asterisk source by anyone that wishes. The first fork was created by a user who wanted to preserve it and who then proceeded to add fax control and other custom parameters, it’s located here:
The second fork was created - largely due, I think, to my prodding, by the developer of the usecallmanager patch, and it is available here:
GitHub - usecallmanagernz/patches: Patches for Asterisk.
in the Asterisk version 22 patch which incorporates an updated chan_sip
My prodding consisted of patching the first chan_sip fork with the usecallmanager patch to prove it could be done with Asterisk 21, (note that the maintainer of the first chan_sip fork claims it cannot be done) which pretty much presented the usecallmanager patch author with the choice of you either do your own fork of chan_sip for Asterisk 22 or I would release a fork of usecallmanager myself for Asterisk 22 incorporating the first chan_sip patch. After waffling, he apparently decided the first choice was better. LOL
So, in summary, your simplistic statement is pretty much wrong - it does not matter what effort the userbase puts into something - because Asterisk has corporate overlords, that effort can be squashed if those overlords don’t like that the userbase is doing. They don’t, apparently like chan_sip.
Interestingly, other user/developers of Asterisk have TRIED suggesting a compromise/politcal middle ground where chan_sip was repackaged as something like chan_cisco by the usecallmanager patch author so that Asterisk could incorporate it - which is, in fact, precisely what he has done with his latest iteration. However, the Asterisk project’s corporate overlords are resolute in their rejection of chan_sip and will consider no compromise. I rather suspect this is possibly related to their wishing NOT to infuriate the 600 pound Cisco gorilla but that’s just my speculation.
Sangoma/Asterisk could easily squash the Raspberry Pi users no matter what that userbase does in the way of support, if they wanted to. But, they don’t want to - my suspicions are because Sangoma is waiting for the RPi’s hardware releases to become powerful enough to be used as something better than a child’s toy so they might release a sort of Switchvox-Lite based around that to compliment the Intel-based Switchvox. Which has, in fact, been happening over the years within the RPi community however that community is currently becoming fractionalized about it, since they have started to bifurcate, with various Pi versions, some cheaper and less powerful some more expensive and more powerful.
ANYWAY, while these politics I just documented exist due to corporate sponsorship of Asterisk, they are rather small potatoes, compared to the corporate politics that goes on in the Linux Foundation. You may not know this but there have been Windows Desktop lookalikes for X windows for many years. Boomerang was one, and the Zorin OS project is probably the most successful.
But, the response from the “major” Linux distribution developers has been pretty negative. These efforts exist to assist in migrating Windows desktop users over to Linux which every Linux distro claims it wants to do - but when the chips are down - the majors just don’t. It would be easy to incorporate a checkbox into the major distros like Ubuntu Desktop, Debian, etc. to “make the resulting desktop look like Windows” but they won’t do it. It’s all corporate politics - the Linux foundation is funded by Microsoft, among others, and they don’t want to throw the red flag in front of the bull.
The same corporate politics exists with X Windows, check out this facinating read of the politics going on nowadays:
Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions • The Register
The statement from that article:
“… According to that new project’s leader, the X.org maintainers have turned down thousands of code changes and improvements to its X11 server in recent years…”
gives lie to your claim that it’s up to me and my fellow users to keep Asterisk or any major FOSS project alive. It’s not. The user effort only counts for part of the effort. Large FOSS projects require full time employees and someone has to pay to put food on the table of those employees, and that money comes from the corporate community who has to preserve their income streams - and so those partners apply pressure to FOSS which results in the rejection of user efforts at times.
It’s an imperfect world. But I WILL point out that ultimately, even with the corporate politics and BS injected into FOSS, the ultimate result IS that basically, those who make the effort get the software “for free, as in free beer” while those who just want to get behind the wheel, turn the key, step on the gas and go - without understanding squat about what makes the engine go - THEY end up having to pay. So, it DOES preserve choice - you can choose to apply yourself and understand how things work on a starship - or you can choose to be lazy, ignorant and get mind-melded against your will.