Mark Spencer (computer engineer)

Last updated
Mark Spencer
Mark Spencer (cropped).jpg
Mark Spencer at the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference
Born (1977-04-08) April 8, 1977 (age 46)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Auburn University
Occupation Computer engineer

Mark Spencer (born April 8, 1977) is an American computer engineer and is the original author of the GTK+-based instant messaging client Gaim (which has since been renamed to Pidgin), the L2TP daemon l2tpd and the Cheops Network User Interface.

Contents

Mark Spencer is also the creator of Asterisk, a Linux-based open-sourced PBX. He is the founder, chairman and CTO of Digium, an open-source telecommunications supplier most notable for its development and sponsorship of Asterisk. Spencer shifted from CEO to chairman and CTO in early 2007.

Early life

Spencer was born and raised in Auburn, Alabama. [1] He attended Auburn University where both his parents were professors. [2] In high school, he was mentored by another Auburn professor, Thaddeus Roppel, [2] and Mark Smith, co-founder of Adtran. [1]

Career

While attending Auburn University, Spencer co-oped at Adtran when he wrote l2tpd. He went on to start a Linux technical support business. Spencer did not have enough money to buy a PBX (private branch exchange) for his company so he decided to write Asterisk and later founded Digium.

As a pilot, Mark founded Avilution, LLC. to create Android apps including QuickWeather and AviationMaps. AviationMaps was later spun out to FlightPro, then DroidEFB. Adapting a similar strategy as Asterisk, he developed the eXtensible Flight System, XFS, a cross-platform avionics architecture. XFS has already been integrated in the Zenith CH750 STOL aircraft in the form of both a three-screen panel and the "Unpanel," a portrait-orientation (also landscape) screen to replace the entire traditional glass cockpit. [3]

Related Research Articles

XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as of June 2014, XFS is supported by most Linux distributions; Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses it as its default file system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Carmack</span> American computer programmer and video game developer

John D. Carmack II is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes.

Journaled File System (JFS) is a 64-bit journaling file system created by IBM. There are versions for AIX, OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS and Linux operating systems. The latter is available as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). HP-UX has another, different filesystem named JFS that is actually an OEM version of Veritas Software's VxFS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Auburn University</span> Public university in Auburn, Alabama, United States

Auburn University is a public land-grant research university in Auburn, Alabama, US. With more than 24,600 undergraduate students and a total enrollment of more than 30,000 with 1,330 faculty members, Auburn is the second-largest university in Alabama. It is one of the state's two flagship public universities. The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" and its alumni include five Rhodes Scholars and five Truman Scholars.

Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) is a communications protocol native to the Asterisk private branch exchange (PBX) software, and is supported by a few other softswitches, PBX systems, and softphones. It is used for transporting voice over IP telephony sessions between servers and to terminal devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asterisk (PBX)</span> PBX software

Asterisk is a software implementation of a private branch exchange (PBX). In conjunction with suitable telephony hardware interfaces and network applications, Asterisk is used to establish and control telephone calls between telecommunication endpoints, such as customary telephone sets, destinations on the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and devices or services on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks. Its name comes from the asterisk (*) symbol for a signal used in dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digium</span>

Digium, Inc. is a communications technology company based in Huntsville, Alabama, and since 2018, a subsidiary of Sangoma Technologies Corporation. The company makes VoIP business phone systems, IP phones, and hardware products. It was founded in 1999 by Mark Spencer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Hall (programmer)</span> Programmer and major contributor to the Linux project

Jon "maddog" Hall is the board chair for the Linux Professional Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SipXecs</span>

SipXecs is a free software enterprise communications system. It was initially developed by Pingtel Corporation in 2003 as a voice over IP telephony server located in Boston, MA. The server was later extended with additional collaboration capabilities as part of the SIPfoundry project. Since its extension, sipXecs now acts as a software implementation of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), making it a full IP-based communications system.

Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses used, e.g. dual-licensed for software licensed under two different licenses.

FreeSWITCH is a free and open-source telephony software for real-time communication protocols using audio, video, text and other forms of media. The software has applications in WebRTC, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video transcoding, Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) functionality and supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) features.

trixbox

trixbox was a software PBX based on Asterisk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elastix</span>

Elastix is a unified communications server software that brings together IP PBX, email, IM, faxing and collaboration functionality. It has a Web interface and includes capabilities such as a call center software with predictive dialing.

Chih-Wei Huang is a developer and promoter of free software who lives in Taiwan. He is famous for his work in the VoIP and internationalization and localization fields in Greater China. The user name he usually uses is cwhuang.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3CX Phone System</span> 3CX Phone System

The 3CXPhone System is the software-based private branch exchange (PBX) phone system developed and marketed by the company, 3CX. The 3CX Phone System is based on the SIP standard and enables extensions to make calls via the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services on premises, in the cloud, or via a cloud service owned and operated by the 3CX company. The 3CX Phone System is available for Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi and supports standard SIP soft/hard phones, VoIP services, faxing, voice and web meetings, as well as traditional PSTN phone lines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AskoziaPBX</span> Telephone system firmware

AskoziaPBX is a closed source telephone system firmware. It is a fork of the m0n0wall project and uses the Asterisk private branch exchange (PBX) software to realize all telephony functions.

The Raymond J. Harbert College of Business, commonly shortened to Harbert College is the business school of Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Founded in 1967, it grants both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and is one of the university's nine constituent schools. Since 2013, the school has been named in honor of Auburn alumnus Raymond J. Harbert. The business school has over 6,000 students, 73 full-time faculty, and over 53,000 graduates. It is one of the largest business schools in the Southeastern United States.

Stratis is a user-space configuration daemon that configures and monitors existing components from Linux's underlying storage components of logical volume management (LVM) and XFS filesystem via D-Bus.

References

  1. 1 2 Marshall, Mike (November 17, 2011). "Mark Spencer of Digium: 'You have to have internal inspiration to do exceptional work'". The Huntsville Times. Retrieved 2018-03-29.
  2. 1 2 Hardy, Quentin (March 24, 2006). "Dial D for Disruption". Forbes. Retrieved 2018-03-29.
  3. "'Unpanel' replaces traditional instruments on new Zenith model". www.aopa.org. 2017-07-24. Retrieved 2021-04-08.