Copyright (C) 2006-2014 David Sugar, Tycho Softworks. Copyright (C) 2015 Cherokees of Idaho. SIP Witch is an official package of the GNU Project as of August 10th 2007. GNU SIP Witch is also part of GNU Telephony & the GNU Telecom subsystem. The server directory includes some basic example server configurations. OUR GOALS: The goal of this package is to individuals and organizations to communicate securely whether in private or peer-to-peer over the public Internet without intermediary service providers. This package can also operate as a pure SIP based office telephone call server supporting generic phone system features like call forwarding, hunt groups and call distribution, call coverage and ring groups, holding and call transfer, as well as offering SIP specific capabilities such as presence and messaging. Support for using secure telephone extensions, for placing and receiving peer-to-peer calls directly over the internet, and intercept/decrypt-free peer-to-peer audio is also being incorporated into the sipwitch design. Our goal includes creating on-premise SIP telephone systems, telecenter servers, and Internet hosted SIP telephone systems. One important feature will include use of URI routing to support direct peer to peer calls between service domains over the public internet peer-to-peer without needing mediation of an intermediary "service provider" so that people can publish and call sip: uri's unconstrained. GNU SIP Witch is about freedom to communicate and the removal of artifical barriers and constraints whether imposed by monopoly service providers or by governments. WHAT IS SIPWITCH: GNU SIP Witch is a peer-to-peer VoIP server for the SIP protocol. As a VoIP server it services call registration for SIP devices and destination routing through SIP gateways. GNU SIP Witch does not perform codec operations or media proxying and thereby enables SIP endpoints to directly peer negotiate call setting and process peer to peer media streaming even when when multiple SIP Witch call nodes at multiple locations are involved. This means GNU SIP Witch operates without introducing additional media latency or offering a central point for media capture. This also means GNU SIP Witch can act as a secure calling server where all peers directly maintain peer encrypted sessions without central supervision of keys or central decryption of media traffic. GNU SIP Witch is designed to support network scaling of telephony services, rather than the heavily compute-bound solutions we find in use today. This means a call node has a local authentication/registration database, and this will be mirrored, so that any active call node in a cluster will be able to accept and service a call. This allows for the possibility of live failover support in the future as well. GNU SIP Witch is not a multi-protocol telephone server or IP-PBX, and does not try to address the same things like asterisk, freeswitch, yate, all of which require direct media processing. Instead, GNU SIP Witch focuses on doing one thing as a pure SIP call server, and is being developed specifically to do that one thing very well. Our goal is to focus on achieving a network scalable telephone architecture that can be deeply embedded, which can support secure calling nodes, and that can integrate well with other SIP based/standards compliant components. SUPPORT: Resources for supporting GNU SIP Witch will be consolidated and handled principally through Savannah using the existing GNU Telecom subsystem project found there (https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnucomm) as a central point of contact. This sub-project is being reorganized for this purpose. In addition the sipwitch-devel@gnu.org mailing list can be used to submit patches or report bugs. REQUIREMENTS: GNU SIP Witch depends on the UCommon library, which may merge with and become GNU Common C++ 2.0 later this year or early next year. CVS for and new distributions of UCommon will be found in the GNU Telecom project on an interim basis until then. GNU SIP Witch also uses libeXosip2 and GNU oSIP, and these may be found at their respective sites. GNU SIP Witch is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later. CONTRIBUTING: The primary development mailing list is sipwitch-devel@gnu.org For those looking to write faq's or howto's, I could suggest using our wiki, http://www.gnutelephony.org We are requiring any non-trivial contributions to the code base be copyright assigned to the FSF. It is of course necessary to have a limited set of copyright holders who share common interest (some do strongly suggest having a single copyright holder for this purpose; I personally have prefer two...), and it is necessary to have a trustable third party when asking people to do copyright assignment. To me the FSF meets these goals perfectly, and this I think helps assure people the codebase cannot later be taken private or otherwise used in ways "not anticipated" if they do assign copyright.