About GNU Telephony

1. What Was the Original GNU Telephony Project?

GNU Telephony was an official GNU Project initiative developed between 1999 and 2015 to create a comprehensive, non-proprietary telecommunications infrastructure for the Internet age. Evolving from the Free Software Foundation's GnuComm project under the leadership of David Sugar, it encompassed telephone application servers (GNU Bayonne), peer-to-peer SIP routing daemons (GNU SIP Witch), real-time transport libraries (GNU ccRTP), and voice encryption implementations of Phil Zimmermann's ZRTP protocol (GNU ZRTP).

2. Why This Archive Exists

Following the conclusion of active software development, much of the original project documentation became difficult to access. This archive brings together technical history, project descriptions, and surviving references for people studying GNU Telephony and open communications software.

This archive was established to:

• Preserve Technical History: Prevent the permanent disappearance of seminal documentation, cryptographic rationale, and software architecture.
• Preserve Project Context: Explain how GNU Telephony, Bayonne, SIP Witch, ZRTP, ccRTP, and their supporting libraries related to one another.
• Document Sources Carefully: Distinguish recovered original material from independently written historical explanations and new technical documentation.

4. Maintenance and Technical Stewardship

Technical preservation, infrastructure hosting, DNS management, and editorial curation for this archive are maintained by TwoSquares.

TwoSquares stewards the digital preservation of significant open-source and free software technical documentation, ensuring fast, static-first delivery, robust uptime, and cryptographic verification of historical records.