Hello,
first just some important clarifications regarding the origin. The __first ever__ project in this series was SIP Express Router (aka SER), developed from 2001 inside FhG Fokus Institute, in Berlin, Germany -- as a matter of fact we celebrate 10 years very soon: http://sip-router.org/10-years-ser/.
All the other projects with different names are forks (or were forks since Kamailio and SER are again the same). Hopefully, a diagram that I made will help you get properly the evolution over the time, see second slide in this presentation: http://asipto.com/u/42
OpenSER was started as a fork of SER in 2005. Kamailio was chosen as the new name of OpenSER in July 2008 due to trademark issue, days after some guys decided to fork and created the other project -- how and why is history by now and I don't want to get into it (web site on sourceforge.net (see date of registration) or wikipedia for openser show the markers of the true timelines).
Regarding the present, Kamailio and SER are the two SIP server applications released from the same source code -- there are two since during the 3 years of parallel development (2005-2008) each one built different database structures to keep user profiles and routing data. Because of that you will see some modules with same name in folders modules_k/ and modules_s/. Packaging Kamailio or SER will select only one of the duplicated modules, but when building from sources all of them are present. The development portal (hosting the source code GIT repository, bug tracker, mailing lists, a.s.o.) is sip-router.org
The development is done by the same group of people (since 2008, Kamailo and SER devels are one team), quite large and expanding right now (three new in the past months), all working on the same code base, each contributing to own areas of interest.
By the fact of sharing many developers, I can add that our eco-system includes also the OpenIMSCore project (an open source IMS prototyping system - http://www.openimscore.org - currently integrated in main GIT repository) and SIP Express Media Server (aka SEMS, an open source SIP B2BUA/Media Server - http://www.iptel.org/sems).
Other than that, you can figure out yourself our evolution in the past years reading the release notes of versions 1.5.x, 3.0.x and 3.1.x, the next one 3.2.0 to be done soon: * http://sip-router.org/wiki/features/new-in-devel * http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-openser-v3.1.0-release-notes/ * http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-openser-v3.0.0-release-notes/ * http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-openser-v1.5.0-release-notes/
Last I want to add is that with Kamailio we have a clear release policy, packaging new stable branches every 8-10 months in average, while SER is not that much into packaging lately.
Cheers, Daniel
On 8/15/11 4:33 AM, Nick Khamis wrote:
Hello Everyone,
I can only imagine how many times this question has come up since post 2008. Please forgive my reoccurring of the issue.
We are looking to provide carrier grade sip services to our clients world wide. What we need is a lightweight, robust and scalable solution that will allow us to terminate sip calls to our different carriers. Performance, and high throughput are factors very important to my employer. Features such as caller authentication, database back-end, load balancing, and interoperability with asterisk are things we are interested in, as was offered using OpenSER.
With three+ open source proxy servers available on the net puts us in a situation where we have more solutions to choose from, at the same time wish the features from one were available in the other, and vice versa.
With this in mind, we will have to fall back to other factors such as the most reliable, proven and active projects. As mentioned, we would choose functional stability over endless features that we will never use and that add to the projects fingerprint...
I understand that all three projects are forks from OpenSER, people would naturally like to know what differentiates one from the other.
Thanks in Advance,
Nick Khamis Toronto Hydro Telecom
SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users@lists.sip-router.org http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users