Anthony Minessale II is the primary author and founding member of the FreeSWITCH open source softswitch. He has spent almost 20 years working with open source software. In 2001, he spent a great deal of time as an Asterisk developer and authored numerous features and fixes to that project. Anthony started coding a new idea for an open source voice application in 2005. The FreeSWITCH project was officially opened to the public on January 1, 2006. In the years that followed, Anthony has actively maintained and led software development for this project.