GNU SIP Witch 1.0 Announced
The official 10 May 2011 announcement of GNU SIP Witch 1.0, celebrating production stability, carrier-grade peer routing, and community integration.
Historical Milestone Announcement
Preserved release announcement marking the arrival of SIP Witch 1.0 in May 2011.
§1Official Release Announcement (10 May 2011)
**Cape May, NJ & Boston, MA - May 10, 2011**
The GNU Project and the GNU Telephony team are proud to announce the general availability of **GNU SIP Witch version 1.0.0**.
SIP Witch 1.0 represents over four years of intensive architectural development, field testing, and community feedback. Built from the ground up as a pure SIP peer-to-peer telephone server, SIP Witch operates without transcoding bottlenecks, providing seamless, secure voice and video routing for local offices, enterprise deployments, and autonomous mesh networks.
"With version 1.0, SIP Witch has demonstrated that organizations do not need to submit to centralized surveillance or proprietary PBX licensing fees to have reliable, secure telephone communications," said David Sugar, chief maintainer of GNU Telephony. "SIP Witch provides the routing bedrock for personal sovereignty in communications."
Key Highlights of the 1.0.0 Release: - Full production stability across GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo) and BSD platforms. - Mandatory ZRTP cryptographic enforcement policies. - Native integration with the newly announced GNU Free Call peer-to-peer initiative. - Advanced XML-based user provisioning and multi-realm authentication. - Packaging updates for standard enterprise Linux distributions.
§2Archival Context and Later Evolution
The release of SIP Witch 1.0 came at a critical historical moment: only two months after the launch of GNU Free Call and one month before Microsoft announced its acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion.
SIP Witch 1.0 served as proof that an alternative, decentralized vision for Internet telephony was not merely a theoretical white paper, but running, deployable free software.
This page reconstructs material originally published at gnutelephony.org. It has been formatted and annotated for archival preservation.
Historical source: GNU SIP Witch. Reproduced or adapted under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) 1.2 or later where stated.
Historical revision date: 2011-05-10. Restored to permanent static archive in October 2026.