In a keynote session at the Asterisk and Open Telephony Conference here, Kevin Fleming, senior software engineer at Digium and co-maintainer of Asterisk, told an overflow capacity crowd of Asterisk lovers what the future holds for their beloved project.

With the 1.4 release now under his belt, as well as a new Asterisk appliance effort called AsteriskNOW, Fleming is now concentrating his efforts on the 1.6 release, which could be out by the end of this year.

As part of the development process, Asterisk developers have overhauled how they deal with security issues. Fleming boasted that security issues are handled by a core team that address issues 24 to 48 hours from the initial report.

There is also now a formal Asterisk Project Security Advisory reporting system that will provide full disclosure into reported issues and what Asterisk is doing to fix issues.