It's no secret for everyone, that today OsmocomBB is not actively maintained as well as OpenBSC, for example. I think it's mostly due to supported hardware limitations. Currently supported platforms is still a bit of 'black box'. Moreover every day it's harder to find and buy a new one.
Fortunately, there are many SDR platforms available now. Especially interesting devices are USRP, UmTRX, bladeRF, and recently introduced LimeSDR. They can be easily programmed to support just about any type of wireless standard, of course, including some mobile telecommunication stacks. As well as for network side back-end, they can be used to perform MS side operations, excepting frequency-hopping and some phone specific features (like SIM I/O).
So, I think there is a way to bring a new live to, amazing child of the Osmocom umbrella, OsmocomBB. We can make one work on SDR hardware platforms implementing a 'bridge' between both already implemented L2/L3 and OsmoTRX. I know that there already was some attempts (see sylvain/ms-sdr branch) to make described dreams come true, but development was stopped. And now I am going to start to work around this direction.
What for? - GPRS and EDGE support - More flexible voice routing - Multi SIM support - Next generation networks support (UMTS, LTE) - ...
Currently I am looking for developers interested in this subject. So, any ideas and contributions are welcome! Together we can realize all the things faster and create a new area of research and development. Also for me it's very important to know opinions of Osmocom community members and exactly OsmocomBB founders/developers.