David Sugar, writes . . .

I originally started the ACS (Adjunct Communication Server) project as a GPL licensed multi-line voice telephony server, with the goal to be the most flexible and advanced telephony voice messaging server available. While this project has yet to fully achieve this goal, ACS does enable one to deploy usable voice response solutions today using GNU/Linux and hardware from… either Quicknet, Voicetronix, or Pika technologies.

ACS evolved over time without clear enough direction, and I found it to be lacking in several key respects. Initially I started a re-write of the ACS code base. In the process the package was redesigned with a different and broader set of goals. This work has become known as the Bayonne Package. Bayonne, and by extension, ACS, has became a package in the GNU project as of May 1st. This action occurred concurrently with the founding of GNUCOMM, the GNU Telecom project, to bring immediate telephony functionality to the GNU project.

The current release of ACS is 0.5.7, and is being made immediately available as a GNU package. This release is currently available for download from Voxilla (here) and SourceForge (here). ACS is also available from via ftp (here) and associated mirrors.

Bayonne is still in formative development. Bayonne has been made available through anonymous cvs access from subversions.gnu.org under the module name “bayonne”. At some point in the near future cvs “snapshot” distributions of Bayonne will become available for early testing under GNU/Linux. The first complete release of Bayonne will be referred to as Bayonne 0.6.0, and will at that point in time or shortly thereafter depreciate the ACS code base.

Some have asked why the package name was changed. I felt there are several reasons for doing this. First, I have received numerous complaints over the use of the name ACS in that it is similar to Al's Circuit Simulator and several other packages. Also, I had originally wanted a name that was more than a 3 letter acronym. Bayonne is taken from the name of the Bayonne “bridge”, and represents the idea of this package as a bridge between the computer and telephony worlds. Finally, I wanted to bring across the idea that Bayonne is different than a “1.x” or “2.0” derived release of ACS.

Further information about Bayonne may be found from www.bayonne.cx. A new home page will also appear for Bayonne on gnu.org shortly. While Bayonne is meant to offer a superset of ACS features and functionality, it does so in a very different and much more modular fashion. Bayonne will also introduce call bridging and TDM bus functionality and will offer a bridge between the worlds of analog, digital, and IP based telephony.

As the GNU maintainer of Bayonne, I welcome all suggestions and comments from those interested in free telephony, and I may be reached directly through e-mail as [email protected]. I also fully welcome additional contributors to the Bayonne project and and would be quite happy in helping others start their own free telephony related packages and projects.

David Sugar
Bayonne and Common C++ GNU Maintainer

 
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