Interview with Anthony Minessale from FreeSWITCH

Anthony Minessale is the founder and lead developer of the FreeSWITCH project. With a bunch of rumors flying around this week we decided to go to the source and ask Anthony about the project and where it is heading.

888VS: Anthony, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule, we really appreciate it. First off, for those people who don’t quite get it, what exactly is FreeSWITCH and is it over simplifying it to call FreeSWITCH an alternative telephony engine to Asterisk?

Anthony: Yes, I believe it is. FreeSWITCH shares some common functionality with Asterisk but the problems people choose to solve with FreeSWITCH tend to be much different. FreeSWITCH can indeed be used as an application server or as a PBX but it also is heavily geared towards moving large volumes of telephony traffic making it appealing to service providers and wholesaler/resellers. We have encountered many people use both FreeSWITCH and Asterisk at the same time so like all software it’s a matter of the “right tool for the job”. I am actually a one‐time asterisk developer with many thousands of man‐hours worth of contributions to that project. I have detailed my experiences and the reason I started FreeSWITCH on my site. [http://www.freeswitch.org/node/117]

888VS: How far along is the FreeSWITCH project? Is the code “ready for primetime”?

Anthony: It’s quite ready for production. Several ITSP’s are already using it to power their infrastructure. January marked our 3rd year since I started the project in 2006. Our first stable release 1.0.0 “phoenix” was almost a year ago to the day and we are about to release 1.0.4, which boasts several new features including ZRTP support, SKYPE support, Transparent NAT traversal using NAT‐PMP and UPnP, and several high definition codecs including SIREN from Polycom and CELT a 48 khz codec.

Here is a full list of features [http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Specsheet]

888VS: If someone wanted to replace his or her Asterisk system with FreeSWITCH, would it require lots of coding and relearning completely different config file syntax?

Anthony: It’s not as hard as you might think. The biggest key to understanding FreeSWITCH is a paradigm shift from how Asterisk does things. Both have a lot in common in the fact that they employ modules and use “applications” and what not but the key to learning FreeSWITCH is to look at it from an angle of trying to remove as much of the complexity as possible. Many new Asterisk users “over think” what they want to do and end up trying way too hard. Or awesome community has actually created an “Asterisk Rosetta Stone” [http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Rosetta_stone] that does a really good job of translating some Asterisk concepts to FreeSWITCH. Also, we have a module that lets you implement you dialplan in a familiar extensions.conf format to get you started.

888VS: Are there any WEB-GUI’s in the works for FreeSWITCH to allow for less-technical people to be able to use it

Anthony: There are actually several. There is: WIKIPBX http://www.wikipbx.org/ which has been around about 2 years and PFSENSE plugin http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=11930.15. There is also a new one in the works called TCAPI http://www.tcapi.org/index.php?title=Main_Page (freepbx roots)

888VS: Coming from an open source project myself (trixbox CE) I understand that a large project needs some level of funding to really thrive. Recently there have been rumors that Barracuda Networks has acquired FreeSWITCH with figures ranging up to 1.4 million dollars.

Anthony: All the rumors that Barracuda Networks has acquired FreeSWITCH are false. I do work for Barracuda Networks. I accepted a position at their company some time ago. They are interested in FreeSWITCH but they have not acquired anything other than some of my time. I chose Barracuda as an employer because they are very tolerant to open source developers understanding the need to keep the project alive and the code free. Again, the only true portion of this rumor is that I am indeed employed by Barracuda.

888VS: So really, all that you did recently was change employers? You used to work at Asterlink as your “day job” and now you work at Barracuda Networks?

Anthony: Correct, I took a position at Barracuda Networks several months ago and I have been running the project all the while.

888VS: Without a big company behind FreeSWITCH, is it destined to continue to thrive without funding and remain just a side project of yours or is there any backing to the project to ensure its long‐term sustainability?

Anthony: I believe we already do have several big companies behind FreeSWITCH. Our community is growing every day. FreeSWITCH is designed to attract businesses. We have many companies come to us for consulting which leads to improvements to the code that everyone can share. We have new opportunities to grow the project each and every day. We have been doing fine for over 3 years now and we will continue to grow at an increasing pace as time progresses.

Every year we have ClueCon [http://www.cluecon.com] where we bring together the best minds in the industry and work together to give everyone a platform to build their business on.

888VS: Can you tell us a little more about ClueCon? Who should attend and what can they expect to get out of it?

Anthony: ClueCon is a conference I started in 2005, we like to refer to it as “a conference made by developers for developers”. The next one, our fifth annual, is this August 4th-6th early-bird-registration for $499 still available!), Really in recent years, we have begun appealing to owner-operators as well as the developers and anyone who is interested in getting their feet wet in the telecom industry.  We have all types of people attend from hobbyists to CEO’s of big companies and we have a very diverse speaker list with just about every open source project represented.  (Many by the actual lead developers of that project).  Every year the conference takes place in DownTown Chicago and it’s always a great experience for all.

888VS: Anthony, we really appreciate you taking the time and we wish both you and FreeSWITCH all the best.

To learn more about FreeSWITCH be sure and check out http://freeswitch.org.

Tags: Asterisk, Barracuda Networks, FreeSWITCH, IP PBX, VoIP, VoIP Interviews, VoIP Software, VoIP Systems