from Hacker News

GNU SIP Witch 1.0 released for peer-to-peer next gen VoIP

by Grauwolf on 5/14/11, 6:11 PM with 11 comments

  • by viraptor on 5/14/11, 7:55 PM

    Does anyone know why is it "next gen"? And how does "peer-to-peer" mean in this case?

    The only description of sip witch with some actual content (that I could find) is here: http://www.slideshare.net/gnutelephony/harvard2010 However it's missing some really important points and looks like technical issues are just skipped:

    - How do users locate each other? (looks like user@domain is "known" somehow) GNU telephony blog mentions "peer-to-peer mesh calling networks" but I can't find any actual working prototype.

    - Why wouldn't I just use Freeswitch which can support both nat traversal and ZRTP?

    - How do they imagine the initial connection with both sides behind the firewall if no ports are mapped? (skype can do that due to known network of hosts)

    If they don't have some great solutions here, I'm not sure why are they writing this from scratch instead of adding those "peer-to-peer mesh calling networks" capabilities as a standardised protocol to PBXes which are used nowadays (asterisk, freeswitch, yate).

  • by advisedwang on 5/14/11, 7:47 PM

    The blog post tells us a release has occurred, who wrote it, who the FSF is, what the relationship between Witch and Free Call is. However I can't for the life of me figure out what GNU SIP Witch is.
  • by zbowling on 5/14/11, 9:02 PM

    Asterisk not open enough for GNU?
  • by alwillis on 5/14/11, 10:28 PM

    It’s kind of funny, but not really how they botch the description “Apple OS/X”; all they has to say was Mac OS X.