openser.org to kamailio.org

Ending the series related to fork, several comments about the OpenSER project, related statements and actions.

1) openser.org was redirected to the new forked project

First, you can simply replace openser with kamailio and all your bookmarks will be valid again.

The message sent to mailing list to announce the redirection is misleading with the reasons. The server hosting the project resources (web site, dokuwiki, downloads) is the same for kamailio as it was for openser. There was no change in it. The kamailio.org domain was pointed to the IP address, there was no change in openser.org DNS settings. None touched openser.org settings, everything was announced on board mailing list.

2) “openser becomes opensips”

This statement (or similar, which showed in many locations) really shows the honesty and quality of some people involved in the fork. I do not know how they can stand behind such phrase. A quick investigation will show the truth. If one checks the project site on Sourceforge can see it:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openser/

– this one has been created (by myself) on 2005, all branches and history is there

– tracker items (including closed or open) since project creating in 2005 are there

– web site – if you were before August 2008 to openser.org you can recognize the same site look and structure (dokuwiki, news, documentation, mailing lists, downloads locations) in kamailio.org

So, the truth is that Kamailio is the new name for OpenSER project, we had to change it due to trademark issues. Nothing else has changed, but renaming to kamailio.

3) people behind openser project

Some try to promote untrue remarks. The project was started by three people, among them myself (Daniel-Constantin Mierla) and Elena-Ramona Modroiu. Both continue/improve Kamailio (OpenSER) project and are involved in the management. Voice Sistem didn’t start the project, it is complete lie. If one can get information from Romanian National Trade Office (details available for anyone, for a cost of 5 Euro or so) can see who were the owners of Voice Sistem SRL company at the time OpenSER started and when the fork from OpenSER happened. Then they could easily identify who is presenting the truth and who is lying. Voice Sistem had most of the time two main contributors to OpenSER project, I am one of them (also owning 50% of Voice Sistem SRL). Moreover, since many months ago, there is no person that can legally represent Voice Sistem, sign or take decisions on behalf of Voice Sistem SRL (you can ask this information from Romanian National Trade Office as well).

… for the rest of the statements regarding OpenSER project you find out there I let you to figure out the truth about, just dig in a bit more, a presentation of the facts from one person is very likely to be simply (intentionally) wrong …

I stop here for now with this forking story. I am focusing towards Kamailio 1.5.0, lot of things happened and more news will come, stay tunned and watch:

http://www.kamailio.org

Comments to pointed OpenSER project’s issues

Continuing the series of the previous post, these issues were pointed by the person that started the fork from Kamailio (OpenSER). I find none true or consistent. I am pasting here the comments I did on mailing list some days ago.

1) the need for a new reliable release – delayed or low-quality releases are affecting the credibility of the project

– http://lists.kamailio.org/pipermail/users/2008-August/018966.html
– the link above shows this one was a faster release than in past
– http://www.kamailio.org/mos/view/KAMAILIO-v1.4.0-Released/
– the link above shows the efforts in creating a testing suite which was running on devel server during this development cycle
– the link above shows no much new things in the core, but code cleanup, duplicity removal, source code documentation

2) degradation of the project quality – testing, performance measurements and code quality control are overlooked

– presented before, testing suite was built and running, lot of code was reviewed and improved
– who in the new project (n.r., the new forked project) will do that and couldn’t do it because was blocked in the old project

3) lack of the control, management and coordination of the project – critical project issues could not be handled or solved

– I am not aware of mis-coordinations that could affect the project so badly
– I am not aware of critical issues that could not be solved and there was no report of a critical deadlock
– if there was a failure in management, all from the board share same fault

Moreover, I believe there are facts in the past that openser took care of its quality. I repeat as I said that QA might not be enough no matter is done. If openser 1.3.x is the core component of a platform hosting about 2 millions of subscribers does not ensure some QA, then nothing else can be said, see:
http://www.ilocus.com/2008/03/the_largest_voip_offering_base.html

None above motivates such reactions as happened recently, but if does, then probably with some openess and discussions everything would have been better now.

Worth to link here the board discussions minutes:

http://lists.kamailio.org/pipermail/users/2008-August/018965.html

About the fork from OpenSER

Being one of the founders of OpenSER, involved deep in the management and development, I was (still am) asked about my position regarding the fork from OpenSER, so I am quoting here my email sent to mailing lists few days after.

As an update, the Kamailio project continues OpenSER and has already many new features:
http://openser.blogspot.com/2008/10/towards-kamailio-v150.html

<quote>
Following the last events (n.r. fork from OpenSER project) everybody perhaps wonders what is going on. I was surprised by the way everything happens and I am not sure yet how this resulted.

Probably a bit of time is needed to clarify relations between developers themselves and community as well. There is not any official statement that a developer quited the support for this project, but I guess the trust between some is at lowest level possible.

It is clear that we cannot say anything about a board right now that manages the project. From board discussions summary you may see that discussions were conducted to create a legal entity around the project, a non profit foundation. This might be hard to achieve in this status, but as a personal decision, I am not going in any other management group unless there is a legal framework backing up. Human relations prove to be pretty unpredictable and not conforming with initial statements.

What is sure now – openser 1.3.x and 1.4.x will be maintained properly and I am volunteering to take care but hope others will join. It is really a good achievement of a sip server. Decision about future development will be based on community and developers feedback for this project. I am not going to promise anything by myself as I admit one person (to be more specific: myself) cannot take care of the entire code base — I am just realistic, not willing to sell dreams. I think the people that still believe in the project can come with suggestions and alternatives of future development.

What I can tell for sure, I am not going to join a fork of the original openser project. If something happened to make developers not working together, solution to solve nicely could have been found, in the worst, maybe just by splitting teams, but keeping old domain together just to show the new alternatives.

“Why not joining a fork in this manner?” Because I was one of the founders of this one and involved in development and management at top level. If I failed to build something I started, I had all the tools in my hands, why just creating something similar saying the old is crap but this new one will be the best? What is the difference? Why I didn’t do it first time? Would I be able to fool someone? Does leaving my ship in secrecy on back door will bring more trust on me? I doubt and perhaps you, too.

I am certainly assuming share of the failure in managing this project. I was there, in management, period. There is no single person responsible for mis-management, but it comes just easy for some to blame the others. But I am really confident we built outstanding sip server, all of us contributed with code, documentation, testing to an application that routes million and millions of minutes per day. There were accuses of bad things about project, I will argument in a separate message, this will get too long.
</quote>

Turburea, Gorj, Romania

Sunday, Aug 17, 2008, Constantina Dita-Tomescu, won gold medal of marathon at Beijing Olympic games. At age 38 she became the oldest marathon winner at Olympic games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantina_Diṭă-Tomescu

I am more proud of this success as I am coming from same place, Turburea, Gorj County, South-West Romania. The area seems to have precious resources for long distance running athletics. Constantina’s colleague, Lidia Simon, who won silver medal of marathon at Sidney Olympic games 2000, comes from same village.

Congratulations!

KAMAILIO (OpenSER) v1.4.0 is released

KAMAILIO (OpenSER) v1.4.0 is released

August 7, 2008

Kamailio is the new name of the SIP server known so far as OpenSER. Due to trademark issues, the OpenSER project had to change the name. Officially, the new name was announced on July 28, 2008.

Version 1.4.0 brings many new features since OpenSER v1.3.0 as well as improvements to existing components. An important share of effort was directed to code cleanup and stability. Moreover, new features in core and old modules were added while other 6 new modules were introduced.

Download:

You can download the tarball of the released sources at
http://www.kamailio.net/pub/kamailio/latest/src/
Binary packages for several distributions you can find at
http://www.kamailio.net/pub/kamailio/latest/bin/
http://www.kamailio.net/pub/kamailio/latest/packages/

Packages will be uploaded as soon as they are submitted.

Documentation:

* modules’ documentation: http://www.kamailio.net/docs/modules/1.4.x/
* migration guide : http://www.kamailio.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/install:1.3.x-to-1.4.0

Summary of the new stuff in core:

* overhauled DB API – better performance and safety, more common functionality integrated in the core
* extensive cleanups in database drivers – integrate common functionality into the core for more stability and maintainability
* SDP parser – provides an internal API for parsing SDP
* fixup functions – provides an internal API for fixing module parameters
* new free fixup functions – making safer to use some functions exported by modules in embedded languages such as Perl
* extension to module interface – its now possible to use up to 6 parameters in module functions

New modules:

* db_oracle – ORACLE DB driver – connect to Oracle SQL Server
* dialplan – Dialplan management – dialplan regular expression based translations
* nat_traversal – NAT traversal helper
* peering – RADIUS based peering allowing SIP providers to verify via a broker if source or destination request is from a trusted peer
* ratelimit – SIP ttraffic shaping control and server load control based on your rules
* userblacklist – User-specific blacklists

New in existing modules:

** acc module
* it is possible to log accounting related output to a different log facility
** cfgutils module
* new FIFO functions get_config_hash and check_config_hash for config file checks
* shared PV exported to configuration script
* debugging helpers usable from config script for abort, shm_status and pkg_status
** mysql module
* enable timeouts on connect, read and write to prevent blocking on errors
** database modules
* renaming of all database modules, addition of the prefix ‘db_’, e.g. mysql is now db_mysql
** carrierroute module
* much more flexibility in routing and database supported failure routing, improved internal structure
** dialog module
* internal API reworked for better flexibility
* direction of the message provided via the internal API
* new dialog callback types
* new mi command: dlg_list_ctx
** dispatcher module
* ability to load destination URI flags from database at startup or reload
* new algorithm to hash the content of a pseudo-variable
** enum module
* enum_fquery([…]) replaced by enum_pv_query([…])
** msilo module
* notification system refurbished – message body, content-type, from address and contact header can be dynamically specified with pseudo-variables
** pdt module
* accepts now same destination domain bound to different prefixes
* internal structures and logic optimized for memory and performance
** lcr module
* refactor module functions
* pseudo-variable support
** mediaproxy module
* update to version 2.0
* better performance and scalability as packets are forward in kernel space

New testing suite

* a testing suite to ensure quality checking and regression tests reports has been developed, included in the repository and used during this development cycle

Other important changes

* modules’ documentation has been migrated to DOCBOOK XML format
* doxygen documentation extended and developer guide published
* serweb tables have been removed
* command line tool to manage dbtext in a SQL fashion

These are not all, there is a big change log that gives more details:

* http://www.kamailio.net/pub/kamailio/latest/ChangeLog

OpenSER renamed to Kamailio

On the 28th of July, 2008, OpenSER project was renamed to Kamailio. Here is the announcement of project rename:

“OpenSER project and the community around it have grown considerably in the past three years. Because of its extensive development and high adoption rate, conflicting interests related to the OpenSER name and similar trademarks emerged.

Consequently, we have been forced to find a new name for the project that stands on itself and represent the project in its future expression.

Starting with version 1.4, OpenSER is called Kamailio. Existing OpenSER users can keep on enjoying the benefits of the best open source SIP server available on the market under this new name.

All project infrastructure like the website and mailing list will be in the future accessible under the kamailio.org domain, but we will keep the old one functional for a transition period to make the switch as easy as possible for you.

Kamailio is a hawaiian word. Kama’ilio means talk, to converse. It was chosen for its special flavour. It is hopefully easy to remember and the meaning fits well with the project purpose. We hope you like it too!”

Visit: http://www.kamailio.org