Events, Kamailio World, News

Note: this article was written by Daniel-Constantin Mierla alone, being a personal selection of who or what was considered to have impacted the evolution of Kamailio project to become what it is nowadays.

With less than one month to the major milestone of 20 years of continuous development for Kamailio project, it is the time to look back and write a few articles to highlight the important moments in the project history and who or what impacted it along the years.

For an application, the most important category cannot be something else than the developers. Therefore next is listed, in no particular order, a first group of 20 developers that I think had a consistent and positive impact in the project evolution.

  • Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul – the developer that made the first commit on September 3, 2001, initial author of many core components (config file interpreter, memory managers, locking API, …) and modules (tls, textops, …), member of the initial development team at Fraunhofer FOKUS research institute.
  • Juha Heinanen – one of the first external contributors the the project (first reference to him in the commits history is dated in December 2002), still active in the project nowadays, initial author of many modules (lcr, radius extensions, enum, …).
  • Jiri Kuthan – wrote code for core components and many modules (tm, acc, exec, …), member of the initial development team at Fraunhofer FOKUS research institute.
  • Jan Janak – wrote code for SIP parser and many modules (authentication, database connectors, …), member of the initial development team at Fraunhofer FOKUS research institute.
  • Elena-Ramona Modroiu – developed initial version of a few very important components (pseudo-variables, transformations, …) and modules (xlog, htable, speeddial, …)
  • Andreas Granig – another developer active around the project for more than 15 years, with modules such as path or db_redis, and, for who still remembers, the creator of the defunct web configuration wizard that facilitated the adoption of the project during 2006-2008 timeframe
  • Klaus Darilion – joined the project as a developer in its early phase, contributing to components such as tls, security, enum, dns or presence
  • Victor Seva – besides writing code for many components such as app_lua, debugger, cfgt or pv_headers, he allocated a lot of time for packaging and continuous integration
  • Henning Westerholt – another long time active developer, among those touching pretty much all components of Kamailio, initial author of several modules such as carrierroute, userblocklist matrix or memcached.
  • Anca Vamanu – had a significant contribution to the SIP SIMPLE extensions in Kamailio, being initial author of many presence-related modules
  • Olle E. Johansson – among the first promotors of the project since back in early 2000’s, he wrote code over the time for modules like http_client, cfgutils or snmpstats, curating many times the documentation
  • Peter Dunkley – the initial author of websocket/webrtc extensions for Kamailio, also a major contributor to SIMPLE presence modules
  • Iñaki Baz Castillo – developed useful extensions for Kamailio such as ipops and regex, helping with websocket/webrtc extensions, a promotor of the project in the Spanish community back in the days
  • Dragos Vingarzan – the initial author of many IMS/VoLTE extensions and C DIAMETER peer modules, opening the doors for the use of Kamailio in the 3G/4G/5G networks
  • Federico Cabiddu – many contributions that facilitate use of Kamailio in mobile networks (e.g., tsilo for push notifications and call join) or http_async_client module
  • Marius Zbihlei – one of the developers that looked to improve many of the core components (dsn, IPv6, multi-homed caching, clang support, …), author of dnssec extension and contributor to many other modules (carrierroute, userblocklist, …).
  • Alexandr Dubovikov – authoring sipcapture extension, contributing to siptrace and topology hiding modules, he enabled easier troubleshooting of SIP traffic for large deployments
  • Charles Chance – significant work to distributed message queue extensions and contributed to many SIMPLE presence modules
  • Carsten Bock – pushed like no one else for use of Kamailio in 4/5G networks, developing many of the IMS/VoLTE extensions
  • Richard Fuchs – the main developer behind the rtpengines (the Kamailio module and the external application), ensured that Kamailio plays a leading role in modern RTC with ability to gateway classic SIP endpoints with WebRTC as well as scale RTP relaying to a new level of performances

20 years of development is a long time frame, many well known developers may be missing from the above group, that’s because new articles on this topic will follow up, at least two being already in the oven: Other 20 For Kamailio 20 and More 20 For Kamailio 20.

And it is not only about developers that influenced the evolution and the success of the Kamailio project, stay tuned for updates!

Many thanks for those that contributed to make Kamailio better along all these 20 years!

Do not forget to reserve the dates in your calendar for Kamailio World Online 2021, a completely free live event with presentations, open discussions and the celebration party:

Thanks for flying Kamailio!