Opening Source

Now that Security Season is winding down, my thoughts have turned to open source telephony.

I'll be at AstriCon 2008 in Phoenix (Wednesday, September 24 and Thursday, September 25) and look forward to getting a pulse on where Digium finds itself relative to the rest of the world. 

There are a number of areas to keep CEO Danny Windham and company awake at night.  FreeSWITCH seems to be picking up traction and lining up supporters.  On the hardware side, Sangoma has launched its own developer's program for the open source community and will be supporting FreeSWITCH. 

Nortel has bought Pingtel, lock, stock, and codebase; who knew Nortel and Pingtel had such a deep relationship? Nortel can waive the open source flag and simultaneously work the interoperability angle to Microsoft's UC products.  Digium CTO Mark Spencer has spent time and energy publicly demonizing Microsoft, but he may have been worrying about the wrong company.

If that's not enough, Fonality has worked the PR high ground with a series of releases highlighting its continued growth and key relationships with Dell Computer and BroadSoft. I wouldn't be surprised if Chris Lyman had a hand grenade or two primed and ready to lob out during AstriCon (PIKA Technologies did so at last year's AstriCon, announcing its appliance, but it got muffled by the SwitchVox acquisition).

Digium likely has a trick or two up its sleeve for AstriCon. If I may speculate freely, a relationship with open-source lover IBM wouldn't be a bad idea. If Adhearsion is as good as O'Reilly says it is, some tighter wrapping with Asterisk would be a nice idea.

What else should Digium be working on? Want to meet with me at AstriCon?

- Doug