ETel Coverage: Freeswitch
by Jim Van Meggelen
Part of FreeSwitch's methodology has been to embrace existing technologies as much as possible. Often, existing libraries are integrated into the product, rather than new modules being written. FreeSwitch can do this because it is written under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and thus enjoys more freedom than GPL stuff does (with apologies to Richard Stallman ;-)
FreeSwitch is a fairly new open-source telecom application. While this means that it is arguably not as mature as something like Asterisk, it also means that it can incorporate newer ways of thinking about software development, and benefit from lessons learned along the way. Many of the FreeSwitch team earned their stripes with the Asterisk project.
FreeSwitch is something to keep your eyes on.
|I'll be testing Freeswitch in the near future, but there's another important difference between Asterisk and Freeswtich. The former attempts to be a PBX, that is, to manage endpoints such as telephones. If I understand Freeswitch corretly, their goal is to be a softswitch that handles audio streams and routes them onwards (e.g., to PBXs).|
|Jim Van Meggelen