Open Source Telephony

glengyron writes "Every Phreakers dream of Open Telephony took another step forward today when a small Australian company released their OpenPBX product at CeBIT Australia. Suddenly a massive community of programmers will be able to easily write their own Telephony applications in Perl!"

poor, poor product

[shachart]

Disclaimer: I work for a computer telephony company.

That said, their product is very very poor. Almost no documentation in code (which is a MUST when you go open source), very buggy, doesn't work with most middleware (like Genesys, CT-Connect, TSAPI, Symposium etc.).

Re:poor, poor product

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not talking about this project specifically but documentation isn't so necessary for programmers to pick up on a project as well designed APIs and file formats.

Kick Ass Company (was Re:poor, poor product)

[voxman]

The point is, Voicetronix is a kick ass company that offers good support and put has put a lot of effort into open source projects over the years, of which this is just one. In addition to projects they themselves have initiated, they have contributed to speex, bayonne, and openh323. The feature set will, inevitably, expand.

My issues with their costs(plus an offtopic aside)

[mikecheng]

In the cost comparison on their site, why is a "closed source" PC $700, but an "open source" one only $500? What's the difference? It's not the OS, as they factor in $300 for that later on. It just sounds like they're stacking the books to make their solution sound even better.

The rest of this is going to be totally off topic (besides the fact that I am from the same place as the product mentioned in the story).

Google Cache Links
The poster was smart enough to put in google cache links to the story.

Re:My issues with their costs(plus an offtopic asi

[Anonymous Coward]

From the notes below the cost comaparison:

"The PC required can be low end. Typical free OSs run very well on much less powerful machines than required by modern closed source OSs. Use low cost commodity hardware rather than leading edge. A monitor is generally not required for IVR servers powered by free OSs, as they can be remote administered via telnet."

So the $200 saving in hardware could quite easily be realized.

asterisk

[dago]

ok, I've not RTFA*, but when somebody says 'open source pbx', I think about one solution which now exists for more than 3 years : asterisk pbx [asteriskpbx.com]

* hey, it's slashdot anyway, euh, sorry, its slashdot any way.

Re:asterisk

[Blaine Hilton]

The Asterisk software seems much more advanced then the VoiceTronix. It doesn't appear that either solution has information about reliability, which would be my main concern with a phone system.

Re:asterisk

[jhoffoss]

A coworker is setting this [Asterisk] up to use IP telephony at home with all sorts of extra toy features, and he's dropping qworst services down to a bare-bones, long-distance-less line (he can't lose it completely...yet)

Limits

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cool if you want to limit yourself to H323. But should you also want SIP and MGCP support and be able to use most relevant voice codecs out there, the solution is Asterisk.

Bayonne

[voxman]

Bayonne [gnu.org] is by far the most mature telephony server out there, having been in existence as ACS long before even asterisk was a twinkle in kram's eye. Best of all, it's hardware independent, unlike either asterisk or openpbx. It supports just about every CTI card line that supports linux. They just added both PBX support and H.323 support. SIP is not far off, and if you want to be able to script complex applications in no time flat, optionally dropping out to perl, python, or php for logic, Bayonne is u

Bayonne

[thalakan]

David Sugar and I actually did a lot of the preliminary work to get the OpenSwitch cards working under Linux via Bayonne. The last time I checked the best support for the OpenSwitch cards was still Bayonne - in fact, ctserver's protocol is based on the Bayonne state machine. Although you have to write the telephony parts in Bayonne's scripting language ccScript, Bayonne actually supports Perl scripts for many other functions via a gateway mechanism (TGI).

Asterisk also supports Perl scripts via their own

Re:Bayonne

[voxman]

CTserver is now actually ahead of bayonne in support for the OpenSwitch cards because it's just better tested. I imagine that bayonne will catch up soon, as we'll release a lot more code and docs in the next few days.

All these projects are functional and each have their niche, but asterisk is obviously way more mature as a pbx than either bayonne or CT server.

Telecom application developers want nothing more than good docs. I've been through enough pain with bayonne to feel any other way. If those aren'