Mark Spencer announced the first release candidate for Asterisk 1.0 over the weekend:

We have officially made the first release candidate of Zaptel, Libpri, Asterisk and Gastman available. While there are still open major bugs, they are relatively limited, and it was time to go ahead and get the 1.0 ball rolling in earnest.

ftp://ftp.digium.com/pub/asterisk

Enjoy the code. Special thanks to all the bug marshals and contributers and to everyone who has supported Asterisk through the purchase of Digium hardware. I apologize in advance for our slow 768k link. Please report bugs at http://bugs.digium.com and please read the instructions there before submitting bugs or patches.

I hope everyone can share in my excitement, especially as excited as I’ll be once I’ve actually had some sleep.

This is a great step, as Asterisk hasn’t had a stable release in a while; the preferred way of installing it has been directly out of CVS, but the CVS tree has been so active that the mailing list has been dotted with users with broken builds and weird transient bugs. Settling down for a release is just was Asterisk needs at this point.

I’ll upgrade my home server this week as time permits.