I would like to clarify a few points about the recent Vovida posting:
VOCAL was created by a group of about 50 developers who worked for Vovida Networks, not just David Bryan and David Kelly. David and David wrote the article that appeared in Embedded Linux Journal and that's why they're mentioned in the posting. All in all, VOCAL represents over 100 man months of development.
Vovida.org is a community web site that hosts many open source communication projects and protocol stacks including VOCAL. There are a number of other open source VoIP solutions, most of which do different things than VOCAL. Bayonne (bayonne.sourceforge.net) and Asterisk (www.asteriskpbx.com) both support TDM interfaces, and added (or are in the process of adding) VoIP support, while VOCAL started VoIP-only (and SIP-centric, at that). OpenH323 (www.openh323.org) focuses on H.323, although the latest versions of the code also has SIP support. Probably the most similar stuff to VOCAL is the osip stack (www.fsf.org/software/osip/), the related proxies, and linphone (www.linphone.org). We have done some work to make linphone interoperate with VOCAL.
As for the Slashdot community's comments about the article's opening line, "While most Open Source projects are applications and utilities intended for single users,..." we didn't intend to slam apache, sendmail, bind, mysql and other multiuser projects. We intended to show that VOCAL was interesting because it was built from the ground up as a distributed system that can easily load balance across multiple servers to scale.
We've been trying to make VOCAL easier to install for new users. If you tried earlier versions of VOCAL and found it difficult to install, you might want to try the latest version. We have also built RPMs and Solaris packages so that people can try VOCAL without having to compile the source code. For those who are interested in acquiring the source code, it is available in tarballs and from CVS.
As for the documentation, we have been working on a book for O'Reilly that includes not only user guide material but large amount of detailed information about the data structures and state machines. The book is called Practical VoIP: Using VOCAL and it is due out this summer. People who have seen advance copies have told that, from a developers' point of view, the material is very useful. Thank you for your patience and please stay tuned.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I meant over 100 man YEARS of development.
I would like to clarify a few points about the recent Vovida posting:
VOCAL was created by a group of about 50 developers who worked for Vovida Networks, not just David Bryan and David Kelly. David and David wrote the article that appeared in Embedded Linux Journal and that's why they're mentioned in the posting. All in all, VOCAL represents over 100 man months of development.
Vovida.org is a community web site that hosts many open source communication projects and protocol stacks including VOCAL. There are a number of other open source VoIP solutions, most of which do different things than VOCAL. Bayonne (bayonne.sourceforge.net) and Asterisk (www.asteriskpbx.com) both support TDM interfaces, and added (or are in the process of adding) VoIP support, while VOCAL started VoIP-only (and SIP-centric, at that). OpenH323 (www.openh323.org) focuses on H.323, although the latest versions of the code also has SIP support. Probably the most similar stuff to VOCAL is the osip stack (www.fsf.org/software/osip/), the related proxies, and linphone (www.linphone.org). We have done some work to make linphone interoperate with VOCAL.
As for the Slashdot community's comments about the article's opening line, "While most Open Source projects are applications and utilities intended for single users,..." we didn't intend to slam apache, sendmail, bind, mysql and other multiuser projects. We intended to show that VOCAL was interesting because it was built from the ground up as a distributed system that can easily load balance across multiple servers to scale.
We've been trying to make VOCAL easier to install for new users. If you tried earlier versions of VOCAL and found it difficult to install, you might want to try the latest version. We have also built RPMs and Solaris packages so that people can try VOCAL without having to compile the source code. For those who are interested in acquiring the source code, it is available in tarballs and from CVS.
As for the documentation, we have been working on a book for O'Reilly that includes not only user guide material but large amount of detailed information about the data structures and state machines. The book is called Practical VoIP: Using VOCAL and it is due out this summer. People who have seen advance copies have told that, from a developers' point of view, the material is very useful. Thank you for your patience and please stay tuned.