What is the purpose of an open SS7 stack?

SS7 stacks normally cost money (and lots of it). Typically there are up front costs as well as ongoing run-time royalties. This places doing SS7 out of the reach of most consulting companies, research projects, educational institutions or hobbiests. One of the purposes of an open SS7 stack is making one available for these uses and to fill this gap.

Another reason is because of the power of the opensource movement. SS7 stacks are difficult to build, verify and maintain in conformance to the SS7 specifications and standards. This is a task best addressed in the opensource community, where corrections, bug-fixes, and general experience and intellectual capital can focus to deliver the best SS7 implementation ever.

Another reason is that no-one really cares about SS7 (or wants to care). What they care about is the application parts and applications which ride upon SS7. By making an SS7 stack implementation open, and leveraging the opensource movement, it is possible for most (if not all) users of the OpenSS7 stack to not really care what is happening inside of the package. This is not only a reason, but a lofty objective.