GNU Telephony

Today is a good day. I am back from presenting at LibrePlanet 2012 this weekend.

While I wanted to present on and speak about what others in GNU Telephony were doing since often their work gets less attention, it seems many were most interested specifically in hearing about how we are addressing the Skype hole to freedom. While I am actually happy with how this presentation went, I ended up a bit short for time in my presentation, and did not get to the final point I had wanted to discuss, which is something we have been discussing internally for some weeks now, whether we should commit to a “moonshot” goal, such as to deliver a complete turnkey secure phone system by the end of the year in something that could be delivered on a small server (such as a freedombox), and also to do those other hard things. However, it was a brief discussion I had with Eben Moglen right before heading out that I think most directly reflects on this question.

The problem I see in committing to such a goal is that I do worry that we do not presently have enough time, and hence people, or funding to do it, at least that quickly and completely right now. I would hate to commit to a goal that we cannot yet achieve. On the other hand out of the discussion with Eben came some ideas that I think would make this goal even more relevant and interesting if we could commit to it. I was also happy to hear Eben is a knowledgeable user of secure communications, and of Twinkle in particular as privacy is also very much about freedom.

Actually one thing I am also looking for is a hackerspace to do some local development in. We are also looking to broaden participation in GNU Telephony, especially if we do commit to that goal. There is work in GNU SIP Witch I need time to do, including cleaning up access policy, media proxy, and nat handling, and those things alone could consume much time for me already, let alone the many other areas that do need at least some attention. We also want to use GNU Bayonne to offer voice mail and other services for a complete solution.

My LibrePlanet presentation can be found at http://www.gnutelephony.org/data/libreplanet2012.odp.

Happy hacking

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2012 at 11:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.