Choosing a name for the Foundation

In our last meeting, our founding group of members established core areas of focus and collaboration. Chief among our shared concerns was coordinating the continued open source development of the Kazoo open source project and particularly the Kazoo ACDc module.

Our shared view is that without a community of developers making consistent useful contributions, the future of the Kazoo open source project was grim. We each provided a list of possible foundation names to rally around. After much discussion and 2 rounds of voting, we decided that Open Telecom Foundation was the best name to convey our purpose and our goals.

Some have asked, if your focus started primarily with the Kazoo project, why is Kazoo not in your name? Why aren’t you called the Open Kazoo Foundation? This is a great question. Although the health of Kazoo project is a fundamental concern for our group, it doesn’t convey the scope of our interests. We are a group of independent internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) all working together using a collection of open source telecommunications projects.

In conjunction with the Kazoo open source project, our members also use other open source project for which Kazoo has depencies: Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, HAProxy, CouchDB, and RabbitMQ. Although connected in their use by Kaaoo, each of these components are fully independent open source projects used in many other applications beyond the scope of Kazoo. Additionally, there are open source projects (Linux, KVM/Qemu, Docker, Apache, Homer, VoIPmonitor, CGrates, etc.) that our members use that are fully independat and are not inter-dependant with the Kazoo open source project.

Given our larger shared scope of work and interests, combined with our concerns for open source projects and open protocols relating specifically to telecommunications applications, our members feel that name Open Telecom Foundation correctly conveys our purpose and will serve us well for years to come.

Anticipating a vote in favour of Open Telecom Foundation, founding member Noah Mehl was kind enough to volunteer to reserve our domain name opentelecom.foundation.