First, let me express a big thank you to Al and the Nortel team. Under the circumstances the dialogue and willingness to do the right thing over the past months and weeks has been great. There is no fight going on just to make sure everyone understands that. We are glad that we finally got to this point so that we can return to an operational model for the project. The Nortel team has made great and significant contributions to sipXecs over the last 3 years since we started an OEM agreement with Nortel. I know that this fork does not come easy for the Nortel engineers and the community alike and many who have been involved would have preferred cooperation instead of a fork. We will miss Dale's whitespace fixes, Ranga's dry but pragmatic jokes, Robert's expertise, Paul's simplifications, Carolyn's steady hand, Raymond's knowledge of Ruby, Huijun and Arjun's enthusiasm, etc, etc. And of course we will miss Al's knowledge of where the bugs are.
To prevent and preempt any legal discussions from erupting, let me make clear that Avaya has all the rights to fork the project. In fact anyone can fork an open source project. As Al brought it up, let me make a brief comment regarding copyright. What matters to the community and all the users and developers is the open source license, and not who owns copyright. The copyright on the sipXecs code base is actually fairly broadly distributed. Major holders of copyright include the FreeSWITCH community, Jive Software and the Ignite Realtime community, as well as a large number of other organizations and individuals who contributed to the many pieces and libraries incorporated into sipXecs. Avaya owns copyright on the code base that makes up the SIP part of sipXecs, namely the SIP session manager, related services, and sipXconfig. What should you expect next? 1) Some of the original founders of SIPfoundry created a new company called eZuce. eZuce's mission is to continue the sipXecs effort under SIPfoundry and return to an open open source model where everyone is welcome to participate. We will make an effort to accommodate everyone, provide timely builds, a roadmap, incorporate patches, etc. We are past our first financing, built a sizable team, and are open for business. A public launch of eZuce should be expected soon. If you are interested to learn more contact us directly. If you'd like to participate, we were hoping you would ask. 2) Douglas' git repository will become the new main repository for sipXecs on SIPfoundry. You can find it here: http://github.com/dhubler/sipxecs. We will continue the same high-quality development process with a strong focus on QA. Also, we will no longer require a contributor agreement. 3) Douglas' builds will become the official builds. You can find them here: http://download.ezuce.com/sipfoundry/ We will move this to a SIPfoundry URL as we rebuild the infrastructure. 4) We are working on rebuilding the infrastructure as Avaya asked to take over the SIPfoundry project server. This gives us the opportunity to return the jira tracker to an operational state with no more hidden issues and items that reflect the actual state of the development in the code repository. This will also mean splitting the Wiki. You will see some announcements on this soon as we continue to work with Al and his team to sort through this. 5) You should expect us to publish a roadmap proposal soon, soliciting feedback Our suggested focus is both on smaller but also larger deployments. We should look at sipXecs as a software solution that should run on as many platforms possible, be interoperable and hardware agnostic. We also think that sipXecs should be able to scale well beyond the SMB space and we will push the technology to offer managed services enablement and hosting. 6) We expect the mailing lists to continue for now as they are setup. We will have to transition the infrastructure from the current server at sipXecs.sipfoundry.org to a new server, which could cause some short term glitches. We will inform about that as we go along. And finally, we are looking for help during this transition. There are several areas we would like to hear from you. Let me list some of them below: - IT infrastructure help with our tools - Wiki contribution to improve documentation for admins, users and developers - Testing of clients, such as different softphones and clients on iPhones and Android smartphones - Development cooperation - if you'd like to participate we are happy to let you in on the decision making - Case studies and quotes: If you are using sipXecs today, we'd love to hear from you. A wiki article about your deployment would be very helpful - If you are a reseller interested in deploying sipXecs or offering services around it, let us know - If you are an end user and would like to deploy sipXecs, we might be able to help - Localization: If you are able to update UI translations to the latest 4.2 release, we would like to hear from you - Donations are always good J We are looking forward to a continuing good and open cooperation. This includes the Nortel / Avaya team and I hope once the situation normalizes we can establish a new cooperation that will help all of us. There are no bad feelings on our end. --martin From: sipx-dev-boun...@list.sipfoundry.org [mailto:sipx-dev-boun...@list.sipfoundry.org] On Behalf Of Al Campbell Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 8:02 AM To: sipx-users@list.sipfoundry.org; sipx-...@list.sipfoundry.org Subject: [sipX-dev] Future of sipXecs in SIPfoundry Avaya is fully committed to supporting sipXecs as an open source project, and will continue to encourage contributions to this project from the community as well as continue with its own contributions. However, communications regarding the direction of sipXecs, feedback from the community on the roadmap and developer & user support will move to a new open source web portal hosted and supported by Avaya. This split from SIPfoundry has been something we have been contemplating for some time and it was not an easy decision. Bottom line is Avaya didn't feel it could be a primary contributor in something and not control more of the messaging of the project. Avaya will strive to make this project more compelling for developers and users and will provide linkages to its commercial version SCS, so that there is an easy migration path from an unsupported open source version to a fully supported commercial version. This split will happen over the next week and is something being coordinated with SIPfoundry. The migration may yield small outages of tools however we will do our best to minimize this. Just so everyone knows sipFoundry has been working with us on this and although we may have different perspectives on a path forward for sipXecs we both want the technology to succeed. Going forward Avaya is starting a new project (openscs.org) which will allow any of you to participate. As the copyright owner of the sipXecs codebase, and with many users/companies running sipXecs for their telephony needs, we will keep the sipXec name and evolve the code base as part of openscs.org. The new project will focus on getting a broader developer community and lowering the barriers associated with developing sipXecs software. We are very excited about the new project and welcome participation. http://openscs.org Now that the company message has been delivered I wanted to say on a personal note it's been an incredible few years watching this technology mature and become something quite different than the early 3.X versions I first used. Thank you all for the frustrations and fun... Best wishes, Al Campbell Avaya Software Development
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