Open source projects have lowered the barrier to entry into telephony for hobbyists and businesses alike. The popular Asterisk PBX tool, for instance, is a high-functioning and low-budget telephony alternative that has proven disruptive in the world of business telephone systems [1]. Perhaps the most disruptive software of all, however, comes in the form of the scalable softswitch library called FreeSWITCH.

The FreeSWITCH website [2] says that it can be used as a "simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway, or a media server to host IVR applications."

True to that chameleon-like description, FreeSWITCH has appeared in production environments as a telco switch, in numerous business scenarios as a PBX, as a softphone for laptop users, and even as a voice routing engine for the OpenSim project.

[...]