Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

[Posted May 11, 2009 by jake]

From:		Aki Niemi <aki.niemi-AT-nokia.com>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		[Announce] Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)
Date:		Mon, 11 May 2009 21:32:25 +0300
Message-ID:		<1242066745.22268.2.camel@little.research.nokia.com>
Cc:		Marcel Holtmann <marcel-AT-holtmann.org>

Intel and Nokia are pleased to jointly announce the oFono project
(http://ofono.org), an open source project for developing an open source
telephony solution.

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an
infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications.
oFono.org is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus
API for use by telephony applications of any license.  oFono.org also
includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with Open Source as
well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage
back-ends.  The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public
standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 "AT command set for User
Equipment (UE)."

Source code is available on http://ofono.org/downloads and a high-level
architecture diagram is available on http://ofono.org/documentation.  To
join the mailing list, go to http://lists.ofono.org/listinfo/ofono.

Nokia and Intel will jointly maintain the oFono project.  We'd like to
invite all developers to join the oFono.org effort and community.

Marcel Holtmann <holtmann@linux.intel.com>, Intel Open Source Technology
Center
Aki Niemi <aki.niemi@nokia.com>, Nokia Devices R&D, Maemo Software

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 11, 2009 19:00 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (14 responses)

I wonder how this compares with FreeSmartPhone:

http://www.freesmartphone.org/

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 11, 2009 19:26 UTC (Mon) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (4 responses)

Actually this seems to follow the same philosophy as FSO as you said: D-bus based approach, and nothing more than a framework. All higher-level stuff vendor-dependant.

I wonder why they don't support FSO instead. And I can't see how Intel fits in at this point - StrongARM seems to be "dead" and other manufacturers have much more attractive CPUs (price and performance wise).

Or maybe Intel has some new embedded CPU's that I am not aware of.

So no more Windows Mobile, nor Symbian ? Strikes me as odd too. Intel seems to be drifting away from Microsoft lately. But something tells me not to believe it.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 11, 2009 20:18 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I donno. StrongArm is probably the most convient platform for them to do development with. If it's actually Intel putting work into it then they probably have toolchains and development machines setup for other purposes already. Just pull them out of storage and there you go.

Otherwise I expect that they are coded to be portable and all that, seeing how Intel is more and more interested in x86 on handhelds and whatnot.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 2:06 UTC (Tue) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]

Intel is preparing for the x86 based SoCs that we'll see in the years to come. You'd be surprised how much they'll be pushing in the direction of getting their foot into the mobile market, given the quantities in it.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 12:09 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

'StrongARM seems to be "dead"'

Intel sold strongarm (renamed XScale) to Marvell many years ago.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 12:51 UTC (Tue) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

> maybe Intel has some new embedded CPU's that I am not aware of

I am told that Intel sales reps are trying to sell Atom to people who are currently using XScales. This is not really a "drop-in replacement", to say the least.

Of course a lot of the XScale technology went to Marvel, who seem to be doing more with it that I had expected (though they don't seem to get much publicity). What I'm not seeing yet is a replacement for the XScale chips with PCI, or some alternative way to get a high-bandwidth connection between a processor and an FPGA; the choice seems to be e.g. PCIe, which is hard to do at the FPGA end, or some sort of slow flash memory bus.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 3:21 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

I saw this link on the #openmoko-cdevel channel:

http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/ofono.txt

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 9:05 UTC (Tue) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

Specific quote from that link:

<holtmann> Since it is a popular request to compare FSO against oFono, we will be working on writing up the details they have in common and where they differ.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 4:00 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (6 responses)

The reaction from Harald Welte:

http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2009/05/12#20090512-op...

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 11:57 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] (5 responses)

Well, considering that openmoko re-invented their telephony stack three times, it does sound slightly hypocritical to complain about others being NiH..

FSO already some overlap with telepathy (I wouldn't say NiH as a big percentage of FSO is gsm-specific which does not exist in telepathy), so it would also be interesting to hear how telepathy and oFone compare/overlap/co-operate.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 17:13 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (4 responses)

Nokia's Maemo uses telepathy (it was the first to deploy a Telepathy-based client with libjingle for GTalk audio support, as far as I can tell), so this might actually explain why FSO is not being reused.

The next-generation Internet Tablets will finally have GSM/3G capability, so my guess would be that oFono is meant specifically for that purpose: giving Maemo in particular (and GNOME Mobile in general) a cellular stack that integrates well with other standard components.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 12, 2009 17:26 UTC (Tue) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (3 responses)

That'd be great. Possibly the only thing missing for me to buy a Maemo tablet.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 13, 2009 13:44 UTC (Wed) by dufkaf (guest, #10358) [Link] (2 responses)

So far they confirmed only data support (not voice) for upcoming device and Fremantle OS version. Presumably voice will come later.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 13, 2009 13:50 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (1 responses)

Or presumably they don't want to let people play with voice on an open device.

Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

Posted May 19, 2009 16:00 UTC (Tue) by Jaffa (guest, #4327) [Link]

There are hints that voice will be supported by Maemo 5 to some extent; my guess is primarily via headsets (either the wired one already included or Bluetooth preferably).

At a push, it may also support the headset-less "speaker phone" mode you can currently use with VoIP, or even sideways-holding-to-head.

I'd be surprised to see the Maemo 5 device(s) marketed as phones, and sold through normal mobile contracts though.