74 Open Source VoIP Apps

[Aaron Rosenthal]

At some point I’ll be writing a full article on the squillions of Open Source VoIP apps out there but until I find the time to do so, I want to share with you all this list called 74 Open Source VoIP Apps & Resource.

Here at OS-VoIP, one of the things I’m trying to do is help individuals differentiate between Open Source VoIP apps that are ready for the enterprise and which ones are not. A lot of the misconceptions in Open Source VoIP stems from software which hasn’t been finely tuned enough to be enterprise ready or from implementors who just don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Many of the OS Apps in this list of 74 are already widely deployed within the communication infrastructures of enterprises and carriers- like Asterisk and OpenSER. Others have a much lower adoption rate and still require a lot more development until they’re ready for enterprise adoption.

This isn’t a perfect world and hence some functionality required in a phone system is sometimes best left to proprietary software (for now). The good news is that the most important part of a communications system, the brains of a PBX, is perfectly satisfied by OS software like Asterisk and OpenSER. Proprietary software has it’s place in delivering added features and functionality to a system who’s core is built from Open Source software. Functionality like speech to text for example is (for now) best left to licensed software like LumenVox or using a proprietary contact center solution like Aspect on-top of Asterisk.

With the near limitless capabilities of software like Asterisk combined with an ever growing list of Open Source VoIP apps, the difficult part is to know which apps may compromise the stability of the system as a whole and which ones will best complement the functionality of your IP PBX. Either way there’s no question in my mind that the tools and applications already exist to turn Open Source VoIP into an IP communication system that rivals the likes of large proprietary systems by the likes of Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel.

Blog post from www.os-voip.com.