For those of you wishing to get out from under the manky tutelage of “The Phone Company” and go your own open source way, there is a GNU kid in town with an interesting name. He’s short and ill tempered, with a long standing set of issues concerning goats. From LinuxDevices.com:
According to project leader David Sugar, the current stable version of Bayonne provides only a script-driven model for servicing voice applications that require basic switching, a constraint that has limited the software’s utility. “There are many specialized applications, such as VoIP-PSTN gateways, [in] which Bayonne’s entirely script-driven approach is difficult to manage or deploy,” Sugar acknowledges.
Sugar released the first developer’s release of Bayonne 2 on Jun. 27, saying the software would continue to offer a script-driven server, while enabling “completely new voice application services to be constructed using core Bayonne services and drivers as linkable libraries.”
According to Sugar, the new Bayonne release includes a basic PSTN-to-VoIP service binding called GNU Troll, which is intended as a “proof of concept” for a new Bayonne plugin model. “Basic incoming call handling should work under Troll at this point, although much work remains to be completed,” he said.
Sugar adds, “This is the very first step of an inititive to introduce basic IP-PBX services and new functionality to the core Bayonne 2 platform in a modular, user selectable, and incremental fashion. Different bindings will offer different services, and one can choose a binding appropriate for the application being developed, whether it is for integration with traditional analog or digital telephone networks, application services, or gateways for use within an existing VoIP infrastructure — or in eventually offering a complete Bayonne 2-based VoIP infrastructure and other turnkey telephony solutions.”
“Freedom” from the phone company will come at a price. You’ll most likely have to sign a deal with the Devil. So what’ll it be? The Devil you know or the Devil you know? Now that’s freedom of choice.