For those of you who may not know, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has an endeavor called the Patent Busting Project. The goal is to get the USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) to review bogus patents that do nothing more than stifle innovation and encourage patent trolls to sue legitimate businesses. The EFF has scored another victory, and this one affects many of us in the VoIP and telephony industries. Please check out this news release from the EFF. It's definitely good news for OSS telephony.
 

Here's an interesting article over at Fierce VoIP: Within 3 years VoIP will have a 79% penetration rate in businesses. I'm assuming this is worldwide but the article doesn't say specificially. In any case, it's another good sign that FreeSWITCH (along with VoIP technologies, be they OSS or proprietary) will be used a lot in the coming months and years.
 
-Michael

We are pleased to announce that the FreeSWITCH development team is going to meet in one place for the release of version 1.0.5. The official release will take place the week of February 8, 2010! To celebrate we invite and encourage the community to buy the development team dinner one night that week. To donate, simply click the PayPal button on the right side-bar of this page.
 
On behalf of the FreeSWITCH development team: thank you for supporting the project and thank you in advance for giving the guys a well-deserved dinner.
 
-Michael

All those interested in learning more about VoIP and SIP should head over to Ars Technica and read An Introduction to the SIP Protocol, Part 1. It is a slightly technical introduction to how SIP works and is a good foundation for those who need to understand more about how SIP works with the rest of the network. I will post links to any followup articles that Ars puts up.
 
-Michael

We'd like to extend our thanks to Sangoma, a Friend of FreeSWITCH, for continuing to support our favorite open source telephony project. There is a nice write-up over at TMCnet.com discussing Sangoma's future plans for support not only the FreeSWITCH project itself but also the FreeSWITCH community and the ClueCon open source telephony developer's conference.
 

This just came in a few days ago. It's a blog post over at chilling silence wherein the author describes his (rather pleasant) experiences dealing with FreeSWITCH and FreePBX v3. It's a nice read that we thought you might enjoy.
-Michael

Great news! VoIP Today has post a new interview with Anthony Minessale, primary author and lead developer of FreeSWITCH. Please give the interview a read and learn learn more about Anthony, FreeSWITCH, and ClueCon!
 

Our friends at Ars have put up a nice article about the history and future of telephone numbers. It centers on ENUM and discusses other related technologies like DNS and NAPTR. It's a great read that we recommend to all those wanting to know more about the VoIP landscape.

The FreeSWITCH team would like to let everyone know that ESL - the FreeSWITCH Event Socket Library - now supports the TCL scripting language. It is available in the latest SVN as well as the build file at latest.freeswitch.org. Be sure to install the requisite TCL dev package for your platform.
 
Thanks to Mark Mann for writing the sample scripts.

The FreeSWITCH team is pleased to announce that we have added support for the Broadsoft SCA (Shared Call Appearance) method of sharing lines in a VoIP environment. The Broadsoft SCA method is known to work with Polycom, Snom, Cisco SPA (Small Business Pro 500 Series), and Aastra phones among others.
 
Shared Line Appearance and VoIP - Why So Much Drama?