GNU Telephony plans for 2012
Today is a good day. I just distributed ucommon 5.1.0, and a second api and utilities snapshot for what will eventually become GNU Bayonne 3.0. I think GNU Bayonne will become strategic to our goals in 2012, along with GNU SIP Witch and the GFC client. We have already discussed internally an outline and possible goals for 2012 development in GNU Telephony, and I have made preliminary plans to attend LibrePlanet2012 in March.
GNU Bayonne is currently in reconstruction and fits into our plans in respect to offering things like dialing plans, automated voice response, voice messaging, etc. Finishing reconstruction of GNU Bayonne is one of our goals for early next year, and one that should not be too hard to complete, since we have a complete codebase to start from.
Another important feature is local multicast registry operation in GNU SIP Witch. I also have open items related to NAT support, presence, and subscribe-publish operations to complete. On user facing aspects of sipwitch I want to start a qt based GFC client to replace switchview. A Friendica addon is also on the roadmap.
Finally, we will look at converting sipwitch from a server daemon into a library link kit, so we can link it directly into a GFC client. This will be particularly useful for delivering GFC on things like android and still allow us to “link” it into a more traditional daemon server application as needed for other kinds of conventional deployments too. Hence GNU SIP Witch as a package could eventually be able to build both a sipwitch server with supporting utilities (keeping switchview for this use case), and also provide a complete and stand-alone GNU Free Call application.
It is also possible to offer sipwitch, with it’s very low use of system resources, as part of a complete turnkey GNU secure small office VoIP phone system, such as by having it embedded on a router, running on a plug server like FreedomBox, or alternately as a hosted office phone system, where it’s additional attributes such as management of secure extensions become particularly effective. If funding and opportunity become available we will likely explore that also.