It has been several years since the term IMS has become more than familiar in the Telecom domain. By now it has its own critics and fans in the world. I was curious to know whether there are any open source efforts and investments going on in this technology. The result was bit surprising. I could figure out only one prominent open source project for IMS core. The project is from Fraunhofer Institute and called FOCUS.
But unfortunately they don't claim this can be used for direct commercial deployment. Their IMS, as they say, is for IMS oriented research and also for testing conformance of existing IMS systems.
So there is still this void in the space of open source IMS systems. Lets see what happened to other technological domains which were successful as open source projects. Lets take SIP(Session Initiation Protocol) for example. In march 17, 1999, the first RFC of SIP (RFC 2543) came into existence. By the year 2004, there were already a number of open source SIP stack implementations in the market. That also included SIP call simulators, SIP testing tools (SIPP), SoftPhone implementations using these SIP stacks. For IMS, The concept was originally defined by 3G.IP forum back in 1999. Even then, now in 2007, we are still lacking in availability of open source IMS implementations.
Its actually tough to expect a company to build an entire commercial IMS solution as an open source project. Because its enormous and complex, unlike SIP. But I would have certainly liked to see some open source HSS, open source I-CSCF/P-CSCF solutions. If not, at least I expected to see a huge number of open source IMS Application Servers.
But unfortunately they don't claim this can be used for direct commercial deployment. Their IMS, as they say, is for IMS oriented research and also for testing conformance of existing IMS systems.
So there is still this void in the space of open source IMS systems. Lets see what happened to other technological domains which were successful as open source projects. Lets take SIP(Session Initiation Protocol) for example. In march 17, 1999, the first RFC of SIP (RFC 2543) came into existence. By the year 2004, there were already a number of open source SIP stack implementations in the market. That also included SIP call simulators, SIP testing tools (SIPP), SoftPhone implementations using these SIP stacks. For IMS, The concept was originally defined by 3G.IP forum back in 1999. Even then, now in 2007, we are still lacking in availability of open source IMS implementations.
Its actually tough to expect a company to build an entire commercial IMS solution as an open source project. Because its enormous and complex, unlike SIP. But I would have certainly liked to see some open source HSS, open source I-CSCF/P-CSCF solutions. If not, at least I expected to see a huge number of open source IMS Application Servers.
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