[asterisk-users] Digium Fax Driver

[sean darcy]

Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 10:15:42PM -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> 
>> IAXmodem is a completely different ball of wax, and I think you would agree
>> that if the builtin FAX support in spandsp provided excellent support, there
>> never would have been a reason for IAXmodem to be developed.
> 
> Reminder: SpanDSP was originally GPL. Steve Underwood wrote rx_fax.c and
> tx_fax.c that were basically thin wrappers for it. They were not so easy
> to use because:
> 
> 1. They were out of tree to start with (which made life much more
>    difficult. Certainly before 1.4).
> 2. The API and ABI of SpanDSP kept changing, and you had to know the
>    right version to use.
> 3. They weren't much well-behaving Asterisk apps (e.g.: used their own
>    log file) and generally got very little maintinance (also due to
>    (2)).
> 
> There was much resistance to even adding those apps to asterisk-addons.
> I guess that merely (2) would have made them a support burden. IAXmodem
> avoided the issue by using its own copy of SpanDSP.
> 
> With the release of SpanDSP 0.0.5 things started changing:
> 
> A. The license was changed to LGPL for the library itself. This allowed
>    using it is Asterisk and FreeSwitch.
> B. Finally some attention to stable API and ABI.
> 
> An app_fax.c was written initially in Asterisk-Addons only about at this
> stage, with an eye on T.38 integration. Shortly after it was moved to
> Asterisk itself. 
> 
> This was when Asterisk 1.6.0 was at release stages, IIRC. At the time
> IAXmodem was well-mature. So what you wrote should probably be rephrased
> as:
> 
>  If the builtin FAX support in *Asterisk* provided excellent support, there
>  never would have been a reason for IAXmodem to be developed.
> 
> (But still see Lee Howard's comment in the other followup).
> 

OK, back to the original question: Do they provide the same service? I 
get the point that the Digium Fax may (or may not) provide V.34. 
Anything else?

sean