David Sugar, Bayonne GNU maintainer, writes . . . In announcing the third milestone release of Bayonne, the telephony server of the GNU project, I believe it would be of benefit to more clearly define what Bayonne is. In the broadest possible sense, Bayonne is what could be called a “middleware” platform for developing telephony voice response services, though it is unlike any existing telephony… middleware present today.

While interfaces are provided for building virtually any kind of telephony “service”, Bayonne does not in and of itself define any specific application. Bayonne can be used to build applications “out of the box” thru it's native scripting language, ccscript. However, the real power of Bayonne is achieved thru the use of plugins. Plugins are runtime dso objects which directly bind and modify Bayonne behavior.

With Milestone 3, the types of operations available to, and nature of DSO plugins, have been greatly extended. DSO plugins can now drive call behavior directly thru “PortManager” classes. Database services can be integrated with and extend the ccscript interpreter. Finally, a new “bayonne.ext” module has been defined to automatically bind a set of dso held extensions as a single package and can be used to deliver a complete dedicated and directly installable bayonne “application services” such as voice mail, unified messaging, calling card/credit card processing, etc.

Bayonne is free software licensed under the GNU GPL. This means any plugins or applications developed thru plugins are also subject to the GPL since they are direct derived works, and in many cases clearly and directly inherit Bayonne base classes. Bayonne will never support or enable development of proprietary telephony services.

I do recognize that there are very few native telephony API's that support a free software license, and none that support high capacity telephony hardware. For those specific instances, such as the MonteCarlo API, a specific exemption is present in the Bayonne license, to allow use with binary telephony interfaces. At present, Bayonne supports generic “/dev/phone” telephony devices such as QuickNet linejack cards and the Pika MonteCarlo API with Pika analog DSP resource telephony cards under
GNU/Linux. The next milestone should introduce Bayonne support for Voicetronix analog DSP cards under both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

Further information about Bayonne may be found from www.bayonne.cx. Further information about the GNU GPL and the GNU project in general may be found at www.gnu.org.

Related stories:
GNU telephony server project hits second Bayonne milestone
Initial release of GNU telephony server “bayonne”
Bayonne telephony server joins GNU project

 
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