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

It permitted all forms of open source modification and distribution but required licensing if AskoziaPBX is to be sold on commercial products.

AskoziaPBX was started as a proof-of-concept project by Michael Iedema at the Ostfalia - School of Applied Sciences in Wolfenbüttel Germany in January 2007.

[4][5] The project focus was to demonstrate the feasibility of building an embedded telephone system firmware upon Open Source software while providing a consumer usability experience.

This is an additional software module for AskoziaPBX, which allows to create call queues, IVRs and other complex scenarios.

[1] Created in Germany and initially only available in the English language, the firmware and project have now been internationalized.

[16] From late 2008 until mid 2009 the firmware was changed to use Linux as its operating system, replacing FreeBSD.

[11][17] This process was contracted by Auerswald, a German telecommunications hardware manufacturer and was done for several reasons: Asterisk was, at the time, only officially supported on Linux.