New package GNU SIP Witch announced

[David Sugar]

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is an IETF standard protocol for 
interconnecting telephone devices over TCP/IP networks.  GNU SIP Witch 
is a call server which implements the SIP protocol standard while 
supporting generic phone system features like call forwarding, hunt 
groups and call distribution, call coverage and ring groups, holding and 
call transfer, as well as offering SIP specific capabilities such as 
presence and messaging.  GNU SIP Witch will support use of secure 
telephone extensions and enables communication privacy through the use 
of peer-to-peer audio and video sessions directly between connected 
endpoints.  GNU SIP Witch also supports placing and receiving calls with 
directly with remote users over the public Internet without requiring 
the use of mediating VOIP "service providers" in what is commonly called 
SIP "Business-to-Business" (b2b) calling.

GNU SIP Witch can be used together with and to interconnenet common free 
software and IETF standard compliant voice and video capable SIP based 
desktop softphone applications such as Ekiga, Twinkle, Linphone, and 
OpenWango, as well as most standard compliant SIP telephone devices.  
When used together with a standard compliant SIP media application 
server such as GNU Bayonne, GNU SIP Witch will be able to offer users 
and remote callers access voice messaging and media application 
services.  In the future GNU SIP Witch will offer STUN services and 
optional packet forwarding to facilitate interconnection when behind 
NAT's and firewalls in IPV4 networks.  GNU SIP Witch also supports IPV6.

GNU SIP Witch is not a SIP proxy, a multi-protocol telephone server, or 
a IP-PBX, and does not try to address the same things like asterisk, 
yate, or GNU bayonne2, all of which make use of direct media processing 
where media connections and streaming are at least initially established 
between each endpoint and the IP-PBX server itself.  Direct media 
processing adds additional latency, and by introducing a central point 
where all media streams can be processed, compromises both the privacy 
of calls and security of encrypted telephone sessions.

Instead, GNU SIP Witch focuses on doing just one thing as a pure SIP 
call server, and will try to do that one thing very well.  My goal is to 
focus on achieving a network scalable telephone architecture built 
around the SIP protocol that can be deeply embedded, which can support 
secure calling nodes, that can integrate well with other SIP 
based/standards compliant components, and, by not engaging in media 
processing, that is not license encumbered by the use of "mandated" 
patent encumbered and proprietary telephony media codecs.

The initial release of GNU SIP Witch (0.1.0) only offers support of SIP 
registration, multi-target registration, authentication peering over 
SIP, querying of registered user agents, basic audio and video call 
processing between locally registered user agents with call distribution 
for multi-target registrations, and basic SIP instant messaging.

GNU SIP Witch requires the GNU oSIP library and eXosip extension 
library, and the (GNU) uCommon/GNU Common C++ 2.0 core library.  GNU SIP 
Witch is offered under the terms of the GNU General Public License 
Version 3 or later, and has no dependencies on non-free software.  GNU 
SIP Witch can be compiled and used on any GNU/Linux distribution 
supporting GCC 2.95 or later, has been tested with OpenSolaris, 
Free/Open/NetBSD, OS/X, QNX Nutrino, and can be built for use on 
Microsoft Windows targets using Debian GNU/Linux hosted MinGW32 
toolchains.  GNU SIP Witch is a free software package that is part of 
the GNU Project and the GNU Telecom Subsystem.

Downloading Source:

    GNU SIP Witch    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sipwitch
    GNU uCommon      ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/commoncpp
    GNU oSIP2        ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/osip
    libeXosip2       http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/exosip

Web Resources:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm
    http://www.gnutelephony.org
    http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnucomm

Mailing Lists and email contacts:

    mailto:address@hidden
    http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnucomm