Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

IDG’s InfoWorld Recognize Digium’s Asterisk 1.4 as a 2008 Technology of the Year.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. –(Business Wire)– Digium(R), Inc., the Asterisk(R) Company, today announced that IDG’s InfoWorld has recognized Asterisk 1.4 as a 2008 Technology of the Year. Selected by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers, the annual awards, presented this year on January 8, identify the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape. Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephony software with more than one million downloads in 2007 and more than 100 million users worldwide.
InfoWorld reports, "a complete IP PBX released as open source under the GNU Public License, Asterisk is built to run on commodity hardware, providing considerable cost savings when compared with commercial alternatives, and it leverages the open source community for additional testing, bug fixes, and feature development." For a full list of award recipients, see www.infoworld.com.

"InfoWorld tests upwards of 200 IT products every year, and we see many, many good ones," said Doug Dineley, InfoWorld’s Test Center executive editor. "Our Technology of the Year award winners represent not only the cream of the crop, but the best products in the most important product categories. From the top AJAX development tools and SOA middleware to the best blade servers and VoIP systems, these are the products at the leading edge of IT."
Mark Spencer, creator of Asterisk and Digium’s chief technology officer, commented: "The InfoWorld Technology of the Year 2008 award is an enormous acknowledgement of the work and success of the worldwide Asterisk community. Asterisk wouldn’t be in a position to rival some of the biggest vendors of proprietary voice technology today if it weren’t for the inherent strength of open source and dedication of the community of developers."

About Digium

Digium(R), Inc., the Asterisk(R) Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has grown to become the open source alternative to the traditional communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less than proprietary voice communication platforms. Digium makes Asterisk available to the open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and uses business-class Asterisk to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company’s product line also includes a wide range of hardware to enable resellers and customers to design their own voice over IP (VoIP) systems. This year alone, more than six billion minutes of calls will be made using Asterisk. More information is available at www.digium.com.

The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk, Asterisk Business Edition, AsteriskNOW, Asterisk Appliance and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Skype has been found guilty of violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) by a Munich, Germany regional court, a decision likely to influence the way companies approach GPL compliance in the future.

The decision found that Skype had violated the GPL by the way it distributed a voice over IP (VoIP) handset, the SMCWSKP100, which incorporates the GPL-covered Linux kernel in its firmware.

The phone is manufactured by SMC, the target of a separate case that hasn’t yet been decided, but the court noted that Skype was liable to fulfill the conditions of the GPL because it sold the phone on its website.

The decision reinforces that companies must adhere to the conditions of the GPL just as with any other contract, and that "inaccuracies" aren’t to be allowed, according to the court.

It also emphasizes that organizations can be held liable for GPL violations even if they are simply distributing a product and don’t themselves manufacture it.

Another implication is in the fact that neither of the two companies involved is German — Skype being based in Luxembourg and SMC in Spain. The decision shows that companies may be held liable for GPL violations in any country, even if the GPL isn’t upheld in their home country.

The case was brought by gpl-violations.org, a German organization run by open source software developer Harald Welte, which aims to force companies to take the GPL seriously.
Source
Heise English

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Open source SIP stack OpenSIPStack has been rereleased under a triple licensing scheme to ensure that it can be used by the largest possible number of individuals and development communities. This tri-license aims to address the perceived incompatibilities between Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General public license (GPL) and GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL). The stack was previously distributed under MPL 1.0.

Open Source SIP project, openSBC is based on the OpenSIPStack, a fully compliant (RFC 3261) SIP stack designed for stability and scalability, and with a heritage of commercial usage. The project currently contains reference implementations of a session border controller (OpenSBC), Yeya and several components that are useful to developers wishing to use Solegy’s service deployment platform.
OpenSBC

OpenSBC is a reference implementation of a hybrid SIP proxy and B2BUA (back to back user agent) created from the Open SIP Stack core. It is well suited for a number of VoIP implementations. Among other things, it can be used as a Registrar for SIP endpoints, as an entry/egress point for SIP trunking applications, or as a far-end NAT traversal solution.

OpenSBC has been designed for scalability and flexibility. Deployments can grow incrementally with traffic needs because a primary instance can be configured to load balnce sessions across other instances. Each instance may be run on separate servers, or multiple instances may be run on a single server.

OpenSBC can perform the following functions:

Session Border Controller: Full back-to-back user agent (B2BUA) hides network topology with:
- Integrated web UI for basic configuration tasks
- far-end NAT traversal with RTP proxy
- Complete transparency for end-nodes with support for pass-thru of non-standard SDPs,
- Routing using static rules, ENUM or Solegy RTBE
- Comprehensive logs using syslog server
- Encryption of SIP and RTP packets with simple hash

Registrar: Fully standards-compliant with support for pass-through registrations (also referred to as upper registration) and integrated support for presence using SIP/SIMPLE or XMPP.

Proxy: Fully standard-compliant with multi-protocol support (UDP, TCP, TLS*), processing and relaying signals from remote (SIP) and local endpoints.

Presence: Compliant with SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP standards with support for PUBLISH as well as SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY events.

Event Packages: Support for message-summary information about waiting messages (voicemail) and presence

Solegy™ Offers Free VoIP Softphone for Microsoft Windows — Customized Softphones Available to Service Providers with a Full Range of Calling Features and Back-Office Functionality in a Hosted Environment.

Links;
Open Source Sip website
OpenSIPStack web site
Solegy website