I have personally contributed code to the Asterisk project and spent many hours working on bugs etc. I can tell you I am certain that the dependency on the hardware came more from convenience than it did from a conspiracy theory.

When I decided to write my own platform in 2006, I chose to make a timing interface such as this from the start anticipating the need to plug in alternate timing sources. I am glad to see that Asterisk is evolving in the right direction and I wish them luck.

The open-source PBX is definely a very strong alternative to Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft OCS.

I wish you all the luck with the next releases!

2) URL: http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk?view=rev&rev=122928
Log:
Merge res_timing_pthread. This is a timing interface for Asterisk that does not require DAHDI. It’s called “pthread” because it uses a pthread API call in the timing thread for sleeping and ensuring we wake up at an appropriate time. I wasn’t sure what else to call it.

The timing API requires a file descriptor that can be polled on. So, when you open a timer, this module creates a pipe and returns the read end of the pipe. There is a background thread that wakes up every 10ms and checks to see if any of the currently open timers need a ‘tick’ and writes to the appropriate pipe.

3) … and russellb works for Digium none-the-less