Background

Listed below are some of the significant turning points in the OpenSS7 project. These are just the highlights. As you can see we have been doing this for a number of years now...

Jul. 2002

OpenSS7 goes North! Perhap not suprisingly, costs in Canada's Great White North are much less than the costs in bussling downtown Plano, TX. In a continuing effort to keep costs down and to continue providing opensource SS7 and SIGTRAN stacks to the telecommunications industry, OpenSS7 has cut its costs to the bone.

As an extra bonus, we now control our own webservers (rather than using a web host), so we can provide a number of fancy features on the project website that were not available before: like a bunch of new mailing list, cvsweb access to the live CVS archive, GNATS bug reporting, man2html browsing, searches courtesy of htdig, and some other CGI enabled features.

Apr. 2001

OpenSS7 goes commercial. What does this mean to the opensource nature of OpenSS7? Nothing, really. OpenSS7 Corporation was formed to provide funding for the OpenSS7 Project so that the project could continue to thrive in this period of economic downturn in telecommunications.

Jan. 2001

Recent interest in the package has been for providing SS7 support to all manner of GSM, VoIP and softswitches. With this in mind, the new architecture has been designed to accomodate SIGTRAN protocols. (And then the bubble burst.)

Oct. 2000

Made the decision to move to STREAMS using the LiS STREAMS package instead of BSD socket and Linux Native.

Sep. 2000

The `newss7' package had undergone a significant redesign. L2 drivers were previously character drivers but are now network drivers under the Linux kernel. This package is starting to bear less and less resemblance to the original, although it is build on the same GPL base. See the section on design for some information concerning the layout of this package.

Dec. 1998

Recently there has been some interest in obtaining a copy of the SS7 stack. Frankly, there has been more interest in obtaining a copy of the ASN.1 parser and encode/decode engine which I was contemplating writing for the TCAP implementation on the stack. Most of those interested in the ASN.1 compiler were interested in it for uses other than SS7 (e.g., GEHR).

Due to recent interest, particularly the renewed interest in SS7 for use in VoIP and SS7 over IP applications, I have decided to make an effort to drum up interest in an OpenSS7 project and find a home on the web for such an initiative.

Jun. 1996

The `newss7' package is an SS7 package for Linux which I wrote some years ago, on my own time, under GPL. Although the package was GPL'ed, it was not publicly released until recently. I performed some work on the package for a number of clients; however, the GPL on the base package has remained intact. Some information which was proprietary to clients has been removed from the package at the completion of work for those clients. No proprietary information remains in the package, only the original GPL base plus modifications made to that base over the years.