FreeSWITCH is open-source software. So, you will always be able to obtain its source code for free. Also, it is a special kind of open source: you can modify it (or ask some hired consultant to modify it on your specs), build your product on top of it, and sell it, with no need to distribute your modifications or to pay any royalties (it is covered by the BSD like license). In fact, with or without your modifications, building and installing FreeSWITCH from source code is simple. We'll look into it in this chapter.

FreeSWITCH can be compiled and installed on Linux, Windows, *BSD, and OSX, on a range of hardware that spans 96 cores big datacenter servers to Raspberry Pi, from VMWare to KVM virtual machines, and from LXC containers to AWS instances.

For each and every platform, FreeSWITCH depends on a lot of pre-requisites, many libraries, tools, and programs, both for being compiled and for running. Obviously, for your comfort, we have automated those pre-requirements' installation on the most popular platforms.

Also, we make available ready-made packages for the most popular Linux distributions (Debian, CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu). We'll look into this too.

In this chapter, we'll look at how to download and install FreeSWITCH from source code, and how to install it from ready-made packages.

Finally, we will explain how to launch FreeSWITCH and how to run it in the background (as daemon, or service).

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Choosing the platform on which to install FreeSWITCH
• Choosing between installing from source code or from ready-made packages
• Installing FreeSWITCH on Linux and Windows
• Launching FreeSWITCH and running it in the background