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1. Introduction

1.1 About

OpenH323 Gatekeeper - The GNU Gatekeeper is an open-source project that implements an H.323 gatekeeper. A gatekeeper provides call control services to the H.323 endpoints. It is an integral part of most useful internet telephony installations that are based on the H.323 standard.

According to Recommendation H.323, a gatekeeper shall provide the following services:

The GNU Gatekeeper implements most of these functions based on the OpenH323 protocol stack.

Recommendation H.323 is an international standard published by the ITU. It is a communications standard for audio, video, and data over the Internet. See also Paul Jones' A Primer on the H.323 Series Standard.

For a detailed description of what a gatekeeper does, see here.

1.2 Copyright

It is covered by the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). In addition to that, we explicitly grant the right to link this code to the OpenH323 and OpenSSL library.

Generally speaking, the GNU GPL allows you to copy, distribute, resell or modify the software, but it requires that all derived works must be published under GNU GPL also. That means that you must publish full source for all extensions to the gatekeeper and for all programs you include the gatekeeper into. See the file COPYING for details.

If that's not what you want, you must interface to the gatekeeper through the status port and communicate via TCP with it. That way you only have to integrate the basic functionality into the gatekeeper (and provide source for that) and can keep other parts of your application private.

1.3 Name

The full name of this project is OpenH323 Gatekeeper - The GNU Gatekeeper, short GnuGk. We use the name to emphasise that this is free software.

1.4 Download

The newest versions are available at the download page.

The very latest source code is in the CVS at Sourceforge Web-GUI. Beware - that's the bleeding edge.

You can also download executables from the download page.

1.5 Mailing Lists

There are two mailing list for the project, one for the developers and one for the users.

General user questions should be send to the users mailing list. You can find the list archive here. To join this mailing list, click here.

To report problems or submit bugs/patches, send mails to the developers mailing list. The list archive is here. Please send user questions to the users mailing list and keep this list to development! If you want to contribute to the project, please join the mailing list.

1.6 Contributors

The current project coordinator is Jan Willamowius <jan@willamowius.de>

The main features and functions of version 2.0 are contributed by Chih-Wei Huang <cwhuang@linux.org.tw> and Citron Network Inc., including thread-safe registration and call tables, new routed mode architecture, H.323 proxy, H.235 authentication and MySQL backend.

Michal Zygmuntowicz <m.zygmuntowicz@onet.pl> has done some great work on Radius support and other improvements.

The initial version of the gatekeeper has been developed by Xiang Ping Chen, Joe Metzger and Rajat Todi.


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