An announcement from David Sugar, project leader of the GNU Bayonne open source telecom project . . .

After two years of development, a 1.0 preliminary release candidate for GNU Bayonne has emerged from the GNU project under sponsorship by the Free Software Foundation and OST. GNU Bayonne is a freely licensed telephony server allowing small businesses, large enterprises, and commercial telephone carriers to create, deploy, and manage embedded, stand-alone, and web integrated telephony voice response solutions in capacity ranging from a single analog circuit to multiple PRI spans. GNU Bayonne is available as free software as part of the GNU project and is even used to run the phone system at the FSF main offices. GNU Bayonne will also be used to telephony enable key enterprise applications such as customer contact and relations management, automatic order processing, and service dispatch, as part of GNU Enterprise. GNU Bayonne can be obtained in source directly from ftp.gnu.org.

In making a preliminary 1.0 release candidate available immediately, we are seeking additional help from the community in reviewing the 1.0 release, and to provide advanced help for ISV's such as GNU/Linux distributors in preparing for packaging of the full 1.0 release when it appears later next month. GNU Bayonne has been developed with minimal resources and without benefit of any direct industry support or financing. However, many individuals and organizations have nonetheless contributed both time and resources for continuing GNU Bayonne development and we fully appreciate these efforts. We continue to need the help and support of the community to make this and future releases of GNU Bayonne available.

In the past it has been necessary to have expensive computer telephony hardware to use and test GNU Bayonne. The preliminary release is being made available with a new soundcard based driver that will allow anyone with a soundcard to test or debug a GNU Bayonne server, simulate call flow, and create or debug GNU Bayonne telephony applications. We currently need help in various areas, including:

• Documentation review and improvement

• Additional foreign language voice libraries

• Demo applications one can setup and use out of the box

• More extensive testing of voice card drivers

If you would like to help with GNU Bayonne, please send email to [email protected] Further information about GNU Bayonne may be found here.

 
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