After two years of development, a 1.0 preliminary release candidate for GNU Bayonne has emerged from the GNU Project, under sponsorship of the Free Software Foundation and OST. GNU Bayonne is a freely licensed telephony server allowing small businesses, large enterprises and commercial telephone carriers to create, deploy and manage embedded, standalone and web-integrated telephony voice-response solutions. The solutions range in capacity from a single analog circuit to multiple PRI spans.

GNU Bayonne is available as free software as part of the GNU Project. It's even used to run the phone system at the FSF main offices. GNU Bayonne also will be used to telephony-enable key enterprise applications, such as customer contact and relations management, automatic order processing and service dispatch, as part of GNU Enterprise. GNU Bayonne can be obtained in source directly from ftp.gnu.org.

In making a preliminary 1.0 release candidate available immediately, we are seeking additional help from the community to review the 1.0 release and to provide advanced help for ISVs. This help includes such things as GNU/Linux distributors preparing for packaging the full 1.0 release when it appears later next month.

GNU Bayonne has been developed with minimal resources and without the benefit of any direct industry support or financing. Many individuals and organizations have nonetheless contributed both time and resources for continuing GNU Bayonne development, and we fully appreciate these efforts. We continue to need the help and support of the community to make available this and future releases of GNU Bayonne.

In the past it has been necessary to have expensive computer telephony hardware to use and test GNU Bayonne. The preliminary release is being made available with a new sound card-based driver that will allow anyone with a sound card to test or debug a GNU Bayonne server, simulate call flow, and create or debug GNU Bayonne telephony applications. We currently need help in various areas, including:

If you would like to help with GNU Bayonne, please send e-mail to sugar@gnu.org. Further information about GNU Bayonne can be found at www.gnu.org/software/bayonne.