Five years ago we had to rename OpenSER to Kamailio and we continue with it since then. It’s very unlikely that a new rename or other similar disturbance will happen, we own the trademark and the domain names within a solid group of developers.
Although we lost the former project name domain, meaning that we had to start more or less from scratch with reputation, all developers loyal to the project together with the community of users succeeded to bring Kamailio quickly to a world wide recognized brand, keeping it as the leading open source SIP signaling server, offering flexibility and robustness along with a fast innovation process.
It was a really great cycle of 5 years. We started at major release Kamilio v1.4.0, getting out six other major release series v1.5.0, v3.0.0, v3.1.0, v3.2.0, v3.3.0, v4.0.0 (click on version number to see details for each release series). The next one is just few months away, it is planed to be v4.1.0.
Managing to go through two forks over the time, Kamailio became stronger than ever. The development team is at its peak so far and year over year activity is continuously increasing, as shown by the Ohloh project. To quote a bit of the Ohloh statistics, one person would need 217 years to develop Kamailio from scratch (so hurry up if you want to do it…) or a budget next to 12 millions dollars.
A list of what were the new features added along the past releases is available on the wiki. To point some of them: asynchronous transport layer for TCP and TLS, raw socket UDP (30% faster than system UDP), full SCTP implementation, asynchronous SIP message processing in routing script, DNS caching for proper NAPTR+SRV load balancing and fail over, DNSSEC, WebSocket transport layer for WebRTC, over a dozen of IMS-related modules, embedded XCAP server and MSRP relay for rich presence services and instant messaging, prepaid engine, embedded interpreters for Lua, Perl, Python, Java, C#, F# and other managed code languages … and hundreds of other new features.
On the other side, not strictly related to writing code, among variety of important milestones and achievements in the evolution of the project:
- full integration of the ancestor project SIP Express Router (SER) into Kamailio
- running our own standalone conference – Kamailio World
- a healthy business environment around project with a diversity of companies, sprung from developers or community members
- continuous participation with reference implementations, demos, workshops and presentations at events around the world such as Fosdem, Astricon, Cluecon, LinuxTag, SIPit, SIPNoc, Mobile World Congress, IT Expo, UC Expo, VoIP2Day, WebRTC World, OSCon, DevCon, a.s.o.
- winning of Best of Open Source Networking Software Award and ITSPA Members’ Pick Award
Looking back, it was a lot of work, hard work – only that can result in high quality outcome. But even hard work cannot succeed alone, it has to be done by a capable development team collaborating closely with a fantastic user community. And Kamailio project is fortunate to rely on such people. At the core of the project are people that operate daily platforms serving millions of active users or routing billions of minutes per month, people that were involved in the design and deployment of early stage Internet or defining communication standards, people tackling multi-billion corporates to redefine telephony vendor market and real time communication services, people with consistent expertise beyond SIP and VoIP. The evolution during the past and current state ensure a great future for the project!
At the end, it’s yet another opportunity to express the gratitude to everyone contributing to the project, not matter how much, everything as a whole is what counts in the end — do not hesitate to come on board, it is an open and friendly community.
For the rest of this year, watch us closely for release of v4.1.0 and come to meet with our members at events around the world such as Cluecon, Astricon, ElastixWorld, VoIP2Day and several dedicated workshops or trainings coming out in the fall.