Later this week, as part of this year's Libre Software Meeting, being held in Metz, France, I will demonstrate functional GNU Bayonne integration with the OpenH323 stack. This work was largely developed by Mark Lipscombe over the past few months, and should become generally available in preliminary form, along with many other new features, as part of our next major GNU Bayonne release this August, during LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

GNU Bayonne is the script driven telephony application server of the GNU project, and historically has enabled the creation of original telephony application services that could run unmodified on both analog and digital telephone lines using hardware from various CTI vendors under GNU/Linux. With the introduction of Openh323 support, it is now possible to create a deploy both existing and new GNU Bayonne applications in a pure IP telephony environment without requiring any additional hardware. One will also be able to create applications that work identically in both traditional telephone environments and over H.323 session for mixed environment deployments.

Since GNU Bayonne can interconnect H.323 sessions as well as provide interactive or automated voice response, one should be able to create H.323 proxy services using it. With Bayonne's soon to be introduced web scripting, it will become easy to create switchboard type applications that sit in the DMZ and allow both the placement of outside calls through firewalls, and automated reception of inbound call traffic which may then be directed to internal H.323 stations or call agents such as for IP ACD call agent functionality. One application I would like for us to demonstrate this August at LinuxWorld is the recently developed GNU/Bayonne "DAISY" talking book reader, but operating over H.323.

With the elimination of hardware requirements when used as a H.323 application server, it is worth noting that GNU Bayonne has already been successfully ported to xBSD variants such as FreeBSD, as well as to Macos/x, and in the past has been ported to Solaris. It should now also be possible to offer useful voice application services with GNU Bayonne on virtualized GNU/Linux environments, such as offered in S/390 Linux.

As noted, there are a number of additional areas of active GNU Bayonne development, including automatic speech recognition. further PBX functionality, web services integration, and externalized scripting. Some of these things will be part of the August release, and some may appear later this summer.

• GNU Bayonne 1.2.0 released
  
• GNU Bayonne telephone system at LinuxWorld NYC
  
• Update on GNU Bayonne [Linux Journal]
  
• ELJonline: GNU Bayonne is for Telephony
  
• GNU Bayonne adds embedded SQL for telephony
  
• GNU Bayonne telephony server expands support for synthetic voices
  
• GNU Bayonne key telephone switch to be exhibited
  
• Bayonne telephony GNU project
  
• Quick reference guide: Smartphones and Internet-phones with Linux inside