FreeSWITCH is

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

server software for real-time communication applications, including

WebRTC WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication to ...

video Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...

, and

voice over Internet Protocol Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet ...

(VoIP). It runs on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

. FreeSWITCH is used to build private branch exchange (PBX)

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than tha ...

systems, IVR services,

videoconferencing Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio and video signals by people in different locations for real time communication.McGraw-Hill Concise Encyc ...

with chat and screen sharing, wholesale least-cost routing, Session Border Controller (SBC) and embedded communication appliances. It has support for

encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can dec ...

, ZRTP, DTLS, and

Session Initiation Protocol The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating communication sessions that include voice, video and messaging applications. SIP is used in Internet telephony, in private IP telep ...

(SIP). It is implemented as a core library, libfreeswitch, which can be embedded into other projects. It is distributed under the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the conce ...

(MPL), a

free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and software distribution, redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holde ...

History

The FreeSWITCH project was announced in January 2006 at

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's ETEL Conference. In June 2007, FreeSWITCH was selected by Truphone for use, and in August 2007, Gaboogie announced that it selected FreeSWITCH as its conferencing platform. The official release 1.0.0 (Phoenix) of FreeSWITCH was available on May 26, 2008. At ClueCon 2012, Anthony Minessale announced the release of FreeSWITCH version 1.2.0, and that the development team had adopted separate stable (version 1.2) and development (version 1.3) branches. FreeSWITCH 1.4, released in early 2014, is the first version supporting SIP over Websocket and WebRTC. FreeSWITCH 1.6 added support for video transcoding and video conferencing, Verto protocol for WebRTC, and all WebRTC codecs and standards. FreeSWITCH 1.8 was released at ClueCon in 2018 with further updates and stability improvements to the project.

Acquisition

SignalWire Inc. was founded in 2018 to provide commercial cloud telecommunication services utilizing an elastic FreeSWITCH core, and provide a permanent commercial sponsor for the open source project that was controlled by the founders of FreeSWITCH. It then acquired FreeSWITCH Solutions.

Design

According to the lead designer, Anthony Minessale, FreeSWITCH is intended to be a softswitch that is built around a core library, driven by a state machine. The stated goals of the project include stability,

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

, and

abstraction Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or " concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An a ...

Derived products

FreeSWITCH is a core component in many ''PBX in a box'' commercial products and open-source projects. Some of the commercial products are hardware and software bundles, for which the manufacturer supports and releases the software as open source. *

BigBlueButton BigBlueButton is an open source (except for some versions of its database software) virtual classroom application designed for online education. Accessed most commonly through a variety of Learning Management Systems, the application provides ...

is built on top of FreeSWITCH
FusionPBX
is an add-on to FreeSWITCH that provides a web management interface

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Freeswitch Free VoIP software Lua (programming language)-scriptable software Software using the Mozilla license

History

Acquisition

Design

Derived products

See also

References