[Freeswitch-users] FreeSwitch the Right Tool?

Mon Dec 3 09:17:25 PST 2007

It's a joke because I broke my own self-imposed restriction on new
features to write these extra modules.

 The users are actually crying for me to release it now much more than they are crying for stability but, I  will not release it until I am
happy with every aspect including the initial presentation which is 
the primary focus of the next beta release due in the next several days. I am still making large changes in things like the default 
configuration and behaviors and the arrangement of the code.
Once I do a formal release we will no longer change any of this
which means this is my only chance.

I am also up-front which is why I am simply pointing out that it 
was offensive rather than starting your typical flame war.  
Thank you for clarifying and good luck with your investigation.

Anthony Minessale II

FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/
ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/

AIM: anthm
MSN:anthony_minessale at hotmail.com
GTALK/JABBER/PAYPAL:anthony.minessale at gmail.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net #freeswitch

FreeSWITCH Developer Conference
sip:888 at conference.freeswitch.org
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googletalk:conf+888 at conference.freeswitch.org
pstn:213-799-1400

----- Original Message ----
From: Bill Binko <bill.binko at mapshine.com>
To: freeswitch-users at lists.freeswitch.org
Sent: Monday, December 3, 2007 10:52:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] FreeSwitch the Right Tool?

Yikes: I certainly never intended to be offensive.  By cavalier, I
meant dismissive in tone.  It wasn't based on anything other than the
note which read, 

"We promised to stop making new modules or features but.......we lied."

Now, there are two things that could be going on: one is that your
users are crying out for stability, and you are being dismissive. 
Otherwise, it's just a joke, and your users understand your motivation
etc.  All I was doing was trying to figure out which we were jumping
into. As is my nature, I am generally up-front to a fault.

Again, I had no intention to offend anyone, and thank you for your
response.

Bill

Anthony Minessale wrote:

  Sir,

I am not sure I understand your comment about my announcement

of the additional features being "cavalier" My understanding 

of the term, which I double checked at webster.com, is that you are
suggesting that I am dismissing an important matter or have some

sort of snobbish attitude.  Quite frankly, I had decided against 

adding any new features before the release and then I decided that

I must stick with my original plan which was to create a voicemail

module as an exercise to ensure all the components were in place 

for a production system.  I appreciate your feedback and comments but

the cavalier remark is hard to get over.....

To answer your other questions that I did not find offensive:

The reason we use external tools is because computer programing

is complicated and takes many thousands of hours to get right.

Many of the packages we rely on have their own independent  mission

to provide the functionality in question and it's naive and against

the nature of open source to bypass these tools in favor of a home

grown solution.  The main application code of FreeSWITCH contains

nearly 130,000 lines of code by itself and that is without counting

any of the dependency libraries. A prime example is SIP, the Sofia

project works day and night for years on nothing but SIP.  SIP is 

just 1 aspect of our application and we could never match the 

functionality of their sip stack on our own with all the other things

we have to also focus on.  Our mod_sofia is about 8,000 lines of

code on top of that existing sofia stack!

The reason there are so many options is because of human kind.

Due to interoperability, innovation and general bright ideas brought

forth by our human race, we are forced to be flexible because one

man's feature is another man's bug and we must allow the 2 men to 

co-exist by giving them opposing configurations.

In terms of general usability, You will find, if you investigate

closer, that the important behavior is centralized and what you 

may be interpreting as "many ways" to do things is simply the method

of "using" these central behaviors akin to  a "skin" on a gui
application.  Regardless of using an embedded language, a socket 

connection or a simple dialplan, every case results in the same 

core application code doing the actual work which is intentionally

designed in a pyramid of complexity with the top layer being the

smallest and simplest. 

To summarize,  This is a very complicated application and it

takes a lot of comprehension of telephony and multimedia to fully

understand how it works.  Even having the experience, one will

have to investigate the software first hand to fully understand how

it works.  Try to remember the first time you tried photoshop!

As a policy, I make no attempts to convince anyone to use my software.

Please also consider sipX, CallWeaver, Bayonne or YATE or any other

open source telephony application that may be available to you.

  Anthony Minessale II

  FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/

  ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/

AIM: anthm

MSN:anthony_minessale at hotmail.com

GTALK/JABBER/PAYPAL:anthony.minessale at gmail.com

IRC: irc.freenode.net #freeswitch

FreeSWITCH Developer Conference

sip:888 at conference.freeswitch.org

iax:guest at conference.freeswitch.org/888

googletalk:conf+888 at conference.freeswitch.org

pstn:213-799-1400

  -----
Original Message ----

From: Bill Binko <bill.binko at mapshine.com>

To: freeswitch-users at lists.freeswitch.org

Sent: Sunday, December 2, 2007 4:59:15 PM

Subject: [Freeswitch-users] FreeSwitch the Right Tool?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking at FreeSwitch as a platform for an area where we're
expanding our business.  I was wondering if I could get your guidance
on whether it's the Right Tool for what I need.  I realize this is
potentially a Troll, and I apologize, but this seems so far to be a
small, positive group and I thought I'd just come out and ask.

First some background.  I have several clients who want various
value-added phone services.  Basically, they want IVR systems with some
bells and whistles such as recording calls, integration with their
websites, and "follow me" services.  My company has done similar work
for clients on the GIS (mapping) side, and I have personally worked
with Asterisk as a true smart PBX solution, so we are considering
adding this to our offerings.

We have a SIP-based VOIP provider in the colocation site we use that
has attractive pricing and we have good direct connectivity to them, so
we would like to this to be a SIP-only solution (no TDM hardware,
etc.). 

As we started looking at doing this with Asterisk, we found a few
things.  First, there are some real issues getting clear calls through
Asterisk when there is no TDM hardware in place. This seems to be due
to some timing issues, and seems to be worsened by some RTC changes on
Linux 2.6.x.  I wasn't surprised that there were some issues, but we
have had a very hard time getting it to run well on a clean distro such
as CentOS without custom kernel compiles, etc.

Perhaps most concerning, we aren't seeing the kind of community support
we found (and came to rely on) in the open-source GIS space.  Posts to
the asterisk-users board get lost on the way to the list, and when they
do make it through, they get responses like "buy a Digium card just for
timing".  Well, in our 1U servers with only a PCI-Express slot, that's
going to be a trick.

So, I quite literally went to Google and searched for "Asterisk
alternative" and FreeSwitch came up all over the place.  I installed it
on our server and had it running in about an hour with only minimal
pain.  And the sound quality (so far) has been very good when just
playing recorded sounds.

Here's my concerns about it so far - let me know if they're unfounded.

1) It seems to be reliant on a huge collection of external tools.  I'm
ok with running the FreeSwitch recommended versions of all of them, but
isn't going to be a bit fragile as these tools mature separately?

2) It seems young (as a project, not the folks on it).  Things like
this post to the homepage worry me: http://www.freeswitch.org/node/103
as it looks a bit cavalier.

3) It seems to have more options and less guidance that I expected. 
This may be a first-impression thing, but there are many ways to do
everything (Dial Plan, Integration languages, etc.).  That's sometimes
good (Perl took that approach for years) and sometimes awful (the
competing opinions get in the way).

We can contribute back to this project, both with
development/debugging/etc. time and with documentation help, and right
now it feels like the right choice.  However, I thought I'd ask
for some help getting past the concerns above before we jumped in.

Thanks in advance for your time,

Bill Binko

  bill.binko at mapshine.com

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Yahoo Mobile. Try
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