With ClueCon 2009 sneaking up on us, we decided to approach Anthony Minessale and beg him to give us the inside track on his background, the status of the FreeSWITCH Open Source project and everything about ClueCon (more about FreeSWITCH later, if you’re not familiar with it). Anthony graciously responded to our inquiries:

BandwidthU: What’s your background in coding/telephony?
Anthony: “I spent 10 years in the Web Hosting and ISP service industry doing platform architecture before I happened into telephony when researching a way to manage calls to our customer service center.”

BandwidthU: How did you get involved with FreeSWITCH?
Anthony: “I am the original creator and primary author of FreeSWITCH, so I was actually the one to organize and launch the project in January of 2006. Before that, I was a very active Asterisk developer working on the 1.2 release by adding several fixes and features to the code base. My name is still probably visible in the code in many places and I actually own the copyright on some of the files in the Asterisk tree.”

BandwidthU: How does FreeSWITCH primarily differ from Asterisk?
Anthony: “The biggest difference is that FreeSWITCH is a bit more modular than Asterisk. That is to say that FreeSWITCH is broken into much smaller pieces, which means you can hook into more things and combine several small components into exactly what you are trying to accomplish. From a higher perspective, the most obvious difference is that Asterisk is labeled as and designed to be primarily a PBX where FreeSWITCH is a soft-switch which is a lower level of abstraction on the telephony totem pole meaning you can use FreeSWITCH to create a PBX if you wish but you can just as easily use it for several other duties such as SBC or application media server.”

BandwidthU: What are your thoughts on the evolving role of Open Source projects in telephony?
Anthony: “I know several of the other open source project leaders and have had many discussions on this topic. I think our role as open source telephony projects is to man the front lines of the communication revolution that is taking place. We run into a lot of interoperability issues because most users of our software are connecting to commercial equipment such as phones and service providers and we are often pressured to change certain behaviors to accommodate what may not be the properly documented way of doing certain things. Its important for us to recognize this and be sure to follow the standards as much as possible while still remaining compatible with other devices and pave the way to new features and standards that the rest of the world can enjoy. It’s a fairly thankless job.”

Look for more from Anthony in Part II of the interview (coming soon), where we ask him too many questions about FreeSWITCH. The final portion of the interview will cover ClueCon, the FreeSWITCH conference coming up in August.

Tags: Anthony Minessale, Bandwidth.com, business VoIP, IP PBX, Open Source, phone system, SIP, SIP trunking

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