Linux Videoconferencing/Telephony Support

Bathmat wrote in to send us a story on new Linux Telephony. I'm sure most of you realize that this is an area where Linux still tends to lag behind certain other OSs. This one is about White Pine who is apparently hooking up with Red Hat to provide this stuff under Linux.

Comments

Re:And of course, it's non-free

[Booker]

It's perfectly justifiable not to release a free solution

Well... I hate to say it, but it is justifiable. It's their code - they choose the license. That's the way it goes. Would I prefer a free speech version? Sure. But I'm not going to yell at them for offering a product.

My experience w/White Pine "quality"

[jnik]

Summer of 1997. Iowa State University Entomology dept. is going into videoconferencing in a big way (we were driving all over the state to install stuff at the extension offices). Running the White Pine CuSeeMe reflector under Digital UNIX. Sucks. Royally. Can connect from PC's, or up to one Mac, but more than one mac, and you can't see anyone anymore. And slooooow.

Turns out they took their HP-SUX binary and ran it through a translator. With the next release, they dropped Digital UNIX support.

This isn't necessarily a condemnation of everything the company does; things may be very different this time around. But let it serve as a warning before anyone gets too enthusiastic.

Re:programmer attitude

[sledge]

It isn't programmer attitude which keeps the open source developers away. It is the expensive standards. IP Telephony standards tend to require a costly entry fee to get access to the specs. Plus various NDAs. Makes it challenging for open source developers.
Check out http://www.speakfreely.org/ for a good effort in this space.

Re:programmer attitude

[AJWM]

Hah. The AT&T Unix PC, thirteen years ago, had a built-in phone and telephony software. (There's a copy of the review of it I wrote for BYTE on my web page somewhere.)

The Unix PC had a lot of shortcomings (hey, what do you want for 1M of memory and a 10 MHz 68010?), but the Phone Manager software was actually pretty cool. A lot more could be done with today's technology, of course, especially with Caller-ID and other features not available back in the '80s. (And is being done on large Unix systems supporting customer service operations.)

There are solutions being written!

[gherlein]

There are client and server solutions in progress now. Quicknet Technologies, Inc. have recently released pre-alpha Linux drivers for their Internet PhoneJACK card (and soon will support the Internet LineJACK card). The PhoneJACK has a normal analog POTS port you can plug a phone into - the card does all the interfacing needed. The LineJACK has a POTS port and a PSTN port. With these cards, you can make a single port Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone gateway - and there are Open Source efforts underway now to do just that. At this time, Open Source H.323 and MGCP stacks are in the process of being written, and there is a budding effort to do an open SIP stack. There is excellent new RTP/RTCP code available too. There is a growing collection of developers doing this kind of work, and we invite you to join us!

A new mailing list has been started to support efforts to write new code using Quicknet Cards. You can subscribe by emailing to majordomo@linux.quicknet.net with "subscribe linux-sdk " (without the quotes of course) in the body of the message.

We are planning a special developers package price for our hardware to allow developers to save a few dollars up front (and hopefully write some great software!). We'll be announcing this in the next week, most likely.

You can download the Linux drivers from here .

Quicknet is committed to Linux - in fact, counting myself, Quicknet has hired three senior Linux programmers in the last few months. Feel free to contact me (Greg Herlein) at gherlein@quicknet.net if you want more information.