Hello Everybody!

Can you believe how quickly a year has passed? Time is drawing near to many exciting things – Astricon in October and with that, preparations for the first release of Asterisk 16.

The first step in creating a 16.0.0 release of Asterisk is the cutting of the first pre-release version, Asterisk-16.0.0-rc1, from the master branch of Asterisk. It contains all the new features and bug fixes that have been included in the master branch over the past year. While the growth of the automated test suite for Asterisk has made new major releases of Asterisk (16.x, 15.x, 14.x) continue to become more and more stable, it is still important to have users test release candidates of new major releases so that anything missed can be caught before first official release. We urge all of you who plan on using Asterisk 16.x to start testing and evaluating the release candidates. Any bugs found should be reported on issues.asterisk.org

As you may also be aware, Asterisk 15 did not end up becoming an LTS branch, slightly breaking our project convention, due to some core architectural changes that needed more time to evolve in a non-LTS release of Asterisk. Asterisk 16 *will* be an LTS branch, which means it will be supported much longer than the non-LTS releases. For more information about what LTS versus non-LTS means, see [1].

Great thanks to all the many Asterisk community members for providing so much help and support to make Asterisk the great open source project that it is. As I have had the humbling opportunity to lead this project, I have seen what a huge amount of effort on the part of many individuals it takes to provide the rich developer and user community that surrounds Asterisk. Thank you *so* much for your passion and support for the project.

Best wishes to all, happy testing, and stay tuned for more!

[1] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions