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Google makes Chrome OS open source
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Category: VOIP
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
November 3rd, 2009
Skype plays footsie with open source
As I wrote earlier today, when something goes open source we should ask how.
So in contrast with Yahoo’s open sourcing of Traffic Server, let’s talk about Skype’s “open source” move.
Yahoo was trying to build value from community. Skype is trying an embrace and extend strategy like that of Blackboard.
To its credit Skype is being frank on that.
Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.
It’s a half-cheer for open source.
All Skype really plans to open source is a Linux version of its client. The protocol remains proprietary. So if you have a Linux phone (Moblin, Android, etc.) and want to support Skype’s proprietary protocol on your new hardware, you can.
This is the first technology move by Skype since eBay sold it to private investors for $2 billion , followed by assorted legal shenanigans. Everyone involved in that deal wants to protect that value.
But telephony is a low-bandwidth application. Its value going forward shouldn’t be voice as-such, but the integration of voice with other computer applications. In that world being wholly proprietary is a disadvantage. But opening up completely may be seen as giving away the goose that lays golden eggs.
Skype is caught east of the rock and west of the hard place. It knows it needs an open source strategy, but it fears giving itself away.
My view is this is not going to end well.
September 2nd, 2009
Will new Skype owners deal differently with open source?
There is growing speculation, especially given its deal with Digium, that the new owners of Skype may take a different attitude toward open source.
That would be a good thing.
Skype has long been the most popular Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) client, but it is also closed. It was proprietary, not just in terms of its coding but in terms of eBay’s attitude toward doing business.
Its proprietary nature gave Skype the marketing budget it needed to win in the marketplace. But it also hampered VOIP efforts to go beyond voice.
While VOIP gained popularity as a telephony replacement its importance goes well beyond that. Once voice is integrated as a normal Internet service, it can be combined with other services in any number of ways.
The difference between a VOIP program and a Web conferencing system is not that large. You can not only mimic all the common voice services using VOIP, but add more as you need them or imagine them.
This has not happened up to now, partly because much of our voice traffic has moved to cellular networks which digitize it as a matter of course and monitor their networks to gain the most revenue they can out of every bit. For cellular, VOIP is just a way of squeezing more calls into limited bandwidth.
So the question becomes, what can Skype offer, alongside the open source movement, that will make it part of a compelling suite of services rather than just a way to get around telco gatekeepers? How, if Skype is to become part of the open source movement, will we get the word out to the mass market?
Vonage has shown a way to reach the mass market with a service based on open source, but investors are turning away from it due to coming competition from Skype and Google. So can Google deliver an open source VOIP service worth advertising, and what might it add to one?
What is the future of VOIP, and what part will open source play in it?
August 5th, 2009
Is a sandbox the key to open source VOIP
Bandwidth.com sponsors the FreePBX program and Matt Asay asks why.
The correct answer is innovation.
While launching the developer version of FreePBXv3, Bandwidth.com also announced The Developer Sandbox, aimed at creating new applications using IP telephony.
This is the reason to support open source. Telephony software is no big deal. Telephony software that runs on the Internet is no big deal. Telephony software that does more than telephony can be a very big deal. The fastest way to get such software is to share the development load.
But is a sandbox the right way to go? Or would we be better off with a beach?
Where I come from, a sandbox is a highly structured environment. The kids are always supervised. You only let so many kids in at once.
That’s the kind of sandbox Bandwidth.com is running. It will take no more than 20 developers into the first phase of its program. It wants to direct the work toward IP network functionality, convergence between fixed and mobile telephony, and open source telephony based on FreePBX.
My question is whether in doing this Bandwidth.com is being prudent or proprietary. If the sandbox is like a dance club, the application process is like a bouncer at the door. Bandwidth.com seems less focused on luring innovation than on finding business partners.
Telephony is an enterprise-scaled business with relatively few players. But is true innovation going to come from there? Or is it coming from a wide-open international community of individuals? The next great idea could easily be in Russia, in India, or in Brazil. Is this the way to find it?
Will the next great idea come from within FreePBX or from a FreePBX fork?
January 30th, 2009
Does open source control 18% of the PBX market?
Following a reader survey and 150 phone calls, an analyst has concluded that open source now has 18% of the PBX market, the vast majority of it Asterisk.
John Malone runs Eastern Management, a Las Vegas-based outfit with a rudimentary Web site claiming it’s based in New Jersey. His last prominent role was shilling for what the Bells called “deregulation” in 2001, which turned out to be re-monopolization.
The discrepency on location is explained by the fact Malone’s business partner, Robert Saunders, whose title is research director, is located in New Jersey. He may be best known for a release saying an MCI-Qwest merger was a bad idea in 2005.
Malone told No Jitter that his methodology was to first get several hundred surveys completed by the site’s readers, to test his questions, and then to send the questions out to about one-tenth of a database with 80,000 industry names on it.
This was followed by calling 51 vendors, calling 100 VARs, and running the data through his own market models.
What he found was a market of 15.88 PBX million lines in which open source had the largest share, followed by Nortel, Cisco and Avaya in that order. The vast majority of open source lines were found in companies with just one or two locations.
Malone’s analysis gives Asterisk the most credit for this. He says it has 85% of the open source market, with its Digium affiliate having half the installs. Most of the VARs supporting open source are also small.
I can’t tell whether this reflects reality or not, although it sounds quite reasonable. My skepticism has more to do with Eastern’s lack of a track record and No Jitter’s dedication to the interests of the VOIP market.
So let me just conclude by asking readers whether this reflects what you see in the market? Has open source taken over the low end of the PBX market, and does it already have nearly one-fifth of the total market?
October 16th, 2008
Android must become more than a warmed-over iPhone
The early reviews on the T-Mobile G1 “Android” are in and they are OK. (Picture by Matt Miller from his Image Gallery.)
Larry Magid is “generally pleased” with the device. Crave “sliced and diced” it to make an Apple iPhone comparison.
Our official ZDNet review noted how it plays well with WiFi and you might even be able to take it out of the country as more than a doorstop.
Unfortunately you can take the iPhone comparisons only so far, as Google itself is doing by installing a “kill switch” on Android applications.
In theory this is not objectionable, even in such an open system. Wouldn’t it be great to destroy malware automatically from a central server?
But this immediately leads to comparisons with Apple’s “shoot first and answer questions later” use of the same technology.
The bad economy has some predicting bad things for the Android, but if Google is open to innovation I’m not too worried about that.
Let’s just not restrict our view of this so Android is seen as just an iPhone competitor. A lot of companies are going to deliver devices in the next year. Some will be iPhone-like, others will not be. We should stay focused on that.
Just one example. What if someone built, say, a flash drive with the Android software that turned your PC into an Android device? Or turned your Linux-based Netbook into one? Riding whatever WiFi network you happen to find, or even a wired connection? After all, we’re already seeing flash VOIP devices on TV.
These kinds of innovations are possible with an open system. It’s important to see the Android technology as the start of something, not its end.
April 18th, 2008
Will the Internet remain neutral?
Probably not.
What Net Neutrality advocates forget is what has kept the Internet neutral so far has been market discipline, not government.
Most customers want neutrality, and will “vote with their feet” against those carriers who violate it. Assuming, that is, they have a choice.
There are exceptions. A decade ago I did a story about a “Christian ISP” who was making big bucks censoring his customers’ Net access to keep out pornography. Churches, individuals, and businesses were all avid buyers.
The real problem is that, increasingly, choice does not exist. You can get your access from the local cable operator or the local phone company. Other ISPs, which were re-sellers of this bandwidth, have been effectively driven from the market.
Force the incumbent owners of infrastructure to re-sell their bits at a fair price and yesterday’s hearing becomes unnecessary. The alternative was on display at Stanford.
Our own Stefanie Olsen emphasized how Comcast, which is already throttling BitTorrent, stiffed the agency, but I think that misses the point.
More important was the parade of interest groups at the meeting, each with their own agenda.
Engineers like our former colleague George Ou, talked about video demands “causing a new collapse.” For small ISPs, especially Wireless ISPs, these problems are real.
Copyright owners demanded that if regulation is to happen, stopping “illegal file-sharing” must be part of it. By illegal they mean any copyrighted file, which could mean just about any file.
And while Roberta Combs of the Christian Coalition was quick to condemn Comcast’s blocking of a P2P transmission of the Bible, she might feel differently if the file were from the vaults of John Stagliano.
That’s what happens when government starts saying “thou shalt not.” As the late Jimmy Durante said, “Everybody wants to get into the act.” (You can still hang Jimmy on your wall for as little as $5.99 from Allposters.)
April 16th, 2008
Comcast Bill of Rights unnecessary in open source world
All the brouhaha concerning whether Comcast can create a “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” for Internet users is misplaced.
Like any small Wireless ISP, Comcast has the right, indeed the responsibility, to manage its network so every customer gets as much of it as practical.
But customers should also have a very clear right to take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the terms and conditions being offered.
The problem is that right now we don’t.
The result of the market having been broken is that Comcast can impose whatever rules it wants, can even lie about what the rules are, and customers have no recourse.
A decade ago we faced something similar with the Microsoft monopoly. Government sought to impose a solution, and even now we may argue whether the desktop market remains captive to Microsoft’s whims.
But at the same time a solution appeared. Open source. It’s not just a market alternative. It’s an alternate paradigm.
Vast parts of the market have been restored to functioning. Microsoft must now actively compete for the server market, the enterprise market, even the applications market. Everyone benefitted from that. I would argue even Microsoft benefitted.
An identical solution is available in this case. Open spectrum, and open access to the backhaul market.
We’ve seen how it works in WiFi. Open up more spectrum — say in the “white space” between the old TV channels — and you’ll see even more progress.
I mention open access to the backhaul market not because we have a monopoly, but because the dominance of Verizon and AT&T in that space means we could have. And because a competitive backhaul market is important.
There really are just two ways to get a diseased market working again. You can regulate it or you can open it up. Regulation means an unrelenting fight among the regulated, the regulator and the market. As we’ve had at the FCC for many deades.
Opening a market up, enabling new market paradigms to develop, is far preferable. As we’ve seen with open source, it even works.
April 15th, 2008
Can DimDim change the conference game?
Russell would have loved DimDim.
Combining VOIP and open source into a free Web meeting tool was right up his street.
Of course, no doubt he did know all about it. DimDim has been undergoing a soft launch since September and its official release this month is essentially a formality.
The product sells itself. In fact the company has set up special meetings with its top executives which do just that. (Most are Indian veterans of Computer Associates.)
If your set-up is up-to-date, with an integrated camera and microphone in your Windows XP (or later) laptop, and a broadband connection, DimDim is a quick five-minute download.
Meetings are free up to 20 participants, and even the Pro version is just $99. Cheap as chips.
The question is how much of the market is DimDim ready, because I’m ashamed to say I’m not.
While the necessary peripherals are standard on Macs, they’re not standard on PCs, at least desktop models. My own attempts to DimDim with CMO Steve Chazin were laughable.
All my fault, I assure him. I’m sure Russell would have handled it with great aplomb.
The timing for DimDim sounds just right. With gas prices high and rising, with PC prices low and falling, with bandwidth increasingly abundant, a low-cost open source competitor to firms like WebEx should be hitting the sweet spot.
If they take advantage of the community to build the add-ins experienced users have been clamoring for, they won’t look DimDim at all.
Not as dim as me, at any rate.
January 11th, 2008
Digium marketplace is one-stop shop for Asterisk developers
Let me admit up-front. I’m biased in favor of Digium.
It’s not just their location in out-of-the-way Huntsville, Alabama (home of Space Camp), a few hours from my Atlanta base. If you’re a market-leader in Huntsville, you have got to be good.
It’s also how the open source Asterisk technology can not only replace conventional telephony, but truly integrate it with the Web, treating voice as what it is, a low bandwidth Internet application.
This is the proper way to think of voice, just as it’s proper to think of video as a mere Web object. Why do we need separate networks for voice or video when the Web does so well, under open, competitive Internet standards?
So when Digium gets an award as a top technology impacting IT in 2008, I applaud. And agree. As large companies integrate voice into their Intranets, obsoleting their voice networks, they’re going to see real change.
Let’s face it. A phone call, whether landline or mobile, is a pretty lame exercise. You’re not passing a lot of data back-and-forth. You have to follow-up with lots of other interactions to start doing business.
If those interactions are integrated with the call, on the other hand, business gets done more efficiently. You can make your sales pitch on the call, do your negotiating on the call, then sign the papers that evening and enjoy your martini.
Then there’s the new Digium marketplace. Nothing that a lot of other vendors haven’t done, both closed-source and open source. A simple directory structure so you can get Asterisk-based services, or sell them. Without that long drive up I-65 from the Birmingham Airport, because Southwest flies there.
Since Asterisk is an open source technology, its revolution can proceed regardless of how well Digium does. But as 2008 opens they seem to be doing very well indeed.
November 5th, 2007
Why the GOS will fail
The GPC with GOS is really quite amazing.
I remember feeling pretty frugal early this decade, when I bought a 733 MHz PC with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive for just $700. Here you’ve got something twice as fast, with twice the storage, for $200 retail.
If you just need office applications and a link to the Internet, this is cool. It costs less than a dumb terminal did at the start of the decade.
With people tossing their old CRT monitors by the millions this year, and unpacking new flat panels, I’ll bet you can find yourself a screen with just a short drive into the suburbs, and you’ll be doing the environment a favor.
It’s Moore’s Law in action. Things get better-and-better faster-and-faster. You double 1 and get 2, but double 1 billion and you get 2 billion, just as fast as before. All this despite the switch to low-power, multi-core technologies on the part of chip-makers.
So where can this go wrong?
Network access.
This box has a modem and Ethernet port built-in, but you still have to pay to get online. Even if you have a $10/month plan, you also need a land-line phone, which costs $30-50/month. Want broadband? You’re looking at $50/month, plus either a phone or cable connection. Figure $100/month easy.
The target market for this machine is going to find that a steep price. It’s simply unnecessary.
Fact is there is no longer a need for either a phone or a cable network. Telephony is a low-bandwidth service. Double the speed of any broadband connection and you can get full-screen TV, any channel, any show, any time.
The fact is that Moore’s Law is being violated, being ignored, to serve the interests of cable and phone monopolists. They prefer divvying up the bandwidth as “services” so they can charge out the wazoo for it. Cable operators charge both the stations and listeners, plus get a cut of the ad revenue. The much-ballyhooed “FIOS” is just the phone network becoming cable, and cutting your copper to do it.
There is no technical reason for any of this. Give us fatter broadband pipes and we can replicate it all for the price of Internet access. Bring competition to the existing phone network and you can get four times the present ADSL speed, even using old technology, even on copper.
Policy choices have already slowed the Internet’s last-mile to a crawl, and it’s getting worse. You already know about Comcast stopping BitTorrent. Do you know Verizon is now copying the Verisign “SiteFinder” scandal, redirecting misspelled requests to its own ad pages?
Network neutrality? Please. It’s the CorporateNet, and it only feeds the interests of a very small number of corporations.
It was a policy choice to allow these duopolies to return. New policy choices can restore competition and free the bits.
But it won’t happen in time for this product. Everex will sell a lot of boxes this holiday season, but I suspect these will be like a lot of other presents from Christmas past, lost in a closet somewhere because they can’t be made to work, or because the owners can’t afford to let them work.
September 7th, 2007
Bush Administration tells Internet advocates to vote Democratic
Sometimes the truth is partisan. This is one of those times.
If you want an open Internet, one where you’re not being blackmailed by phone monopolists at every turn, whether you’re trying to download or upload, then you better vote Democratic next year.
And let candidates know why.
That’s the only lesson I can draw from the Justice Department’s decision yesterday encouraging Verizon and AT&T, which control both the core and the last mile of the American Internet, to tell net neutrality advocates to suck on it, that they’ve got the monopolists’ back.
Let’s be clear who we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the Bush Justice Department, the Alberto Gonzalez Justice Department. The people who justified mass wiretapping, torture, the use of justice as a political weapon, and on and on.
Anyone who thinks this is the end of the matter, or who like Declan McCullagh wants to wash their hands of this or say “a pox on both their houses” needs to get a grip.
Today McCullagh offers a classic “concern troll” piece in which he manages to blame Nancy Pelosi, net neutrality advocates and “partisan gridlock” for what is not only a Republican political hit, but one of a piece with every other action by the Bush Administration concerning technology since it came to office.
It’s not coincidence, nor is it elite consensus, that has caused the Bell monopolies to be re-built in this decade, this time without regulation, that has allowed these same companies control of vital Internet resources, and that has allowed rigged auctions to give the same companies control of the nation’s wireless spectrum.
It was policy. It was a political choice made by our political leaders.
The result is that the U.S. broadband market has been strangled while other nations have rocketed ahead. Such actions have consequences — economic, social, educational. Consequences which will take years to manifest themselves.
The Bush Administration reversed policies which, in other countries, have been proven to work. Instead of competition, we have a duopoly, which hands out bandwidth through a straw, which defines all bits as “services” it controls, and which must be forced to change through political struggle.
This means holding the political party which talked about competition and delivered monopoly accountable for what has happened. And demanding, in ways candidates understand, that we’re not going to suck on this anymore.
This is no time for Declan McCullagh’s version of high Broderism. It’s time to get mad, time to plot getting even. I think Google, Microsoft, and the rest of the tech sector understands this now.
Sometimes there is just one way to speak truth to power. Sometimes you have to take a stand.
August 16th, 2007
The iPhone bill demonstrates need for open spectrum
It’s bigger than the Star Wars kid. Bigger than the prairie dog looking funny at the camera. We’re talking Macaca big.
It’s the 300 page iPhone bill, in a box that cost $10 to ship, and nothing could better illustrate the need for open spectrum as we head into an election year.
The bill listed every text message, and every file the woman downloaded. That’s how the phone companies roll. Everything you do is an event. Make a call and it’s an event, send a message and it’s a event, look at a web page and it’s an event, watch a TV show and it’s an event.
Every event is chargeable, separately.
The Internet runs differently. You are charged a monthly fee for your Internet access, depending on the maximum speed. You are promised a “best effort” to reach that speed, but the monthly charge remains the same whether you use it an hour or all day.
When the cell companies rush to the FCC and demand their rules for the coming auction of TV spectrum, this is the model they are trying to protect. The event model.
This is why the phone companies want to get into cable, and why they are trying to kill VOIP. This is why they are actively fighting net neutrality and censoring the Internet.
It is in their best interest to do all this, to claim that without controls over what’s done and what equipment runs on wireless spectrum they won’t bid high for newly licensed frequencies.
But that just makes the government complicit. If the government cares only for the money it gets from selling spectrum licenses, and is willing to let you endure monopolistic practices like the iPhone bill, whose fault is that?
It’s yours. Because the government belongs to you. The spectrum should belong to all of us.
With the 300 page iPhone bill, we finally have a clear symbol of what we’re talking about.
August 13th, 2007
Microsoft takes side of angels on open spectrum
When it comes to open spectrum Microsoft is on the side of the angels.
Microsoft is continuing to push the FCC to let devices, not carriers, define what happens on at least a portion of the spectrum broadcasters will abandon in 2009.
Most of the publicity here involves Google, but Microsoft has a longer history in Washington than Google, it has more resources there, and it has allies within the current Administration, who might want Big Green’s help in keeping power after 2008.
In Washington, Microsoft is a better ally to have than Google.
Intel is also hovering in the background of this fight. When the combined lobbying muscle of Silicon Valley goes toe-to-toe with Verizon and AT&T, a compromise is the most likely result.
Any compromise here will kill the phone companies.
We have seen, over the last several years, the economic power that can be generated by open spectrum in the form of WiFi. We have seen how efficiently the resource can be used, and how consumer costs can be dropped to the floor.
The phone companies are right to fear that power, and to do everything they can to keep it from growing. Wireless is the source of all their profits, and if wireless prices drop to the floor they will likely wither and die.
So this is a life-and-death struggle for them, because if the market is unleashed, on a substantial swath of easily-reachable spectrum, the power of the duopolists will disappear.
So here is Microsoft, continuing to press its case, and forcing the FCC to choose between its interests or those of the Verizon-AT&T duopoly.
Here’s hoping Microsoft wins this one.
July 12th, 2007
The open source purpose of new spectrum
What is the purpose of frequency regulation?
Is it to maximize returns for investors or to serve the public interest?
Open source does not deliver as much software profit as the proprietary model, but it does deliver enormous value to customers. Thus the free market likes open source. If the purpose of “competition” was to only maximize proprietary profits, we’d give the market to Microsoft.
This concept seems foreign to the present FCC. Chairman Kevin Martin uses words like “competition.” But the word doesn’t mean what he seems to think it means.
His proposed rules for dealing with spectrum TV must leave in 2009 promote only the private interests of incumbents like Verizon. And Verizon likes it that way.
What consumers and businesses need is more spectrum whose rules are defined by equipment, not by the incumbents’ desires for profit. But it’s clear that is not what we’re about to get.
The U.S. falls further behind in the global wireless market each day because we’re protecting proprietors like AT&T and Verizon rather than the public interest in open source communications.
But that’s where Washington’s head is these days, with the monopolists. Innovators like Google and Skype need to understand who their friends and enemies are, then act accordingly.
Politics is also a competitive business. Those politicians who refuse to work in the public interest need to be replaced.
July 9th, 2007
Can OpenMoko break the wireless monopoly?
Open source telephony takes a big step forward today as the OpenMoko neo1973 starts shipping to developers. Its public Wiki is also open for business.
The phone runs an open Linux kernel and what it calls Mobile FOSS, meaning everything inside it is Free and Open Source Software. Parts were chosen based on the availability of complete documentation.
The company behind this is run by Sean Moss-Pultz, who is based in Taiwan, and German Harold Welte, who may be best known for the GPL-Violations project. His blog describes just how tough it has been to get the project this far.
But can it get further? U.S. carriers are notorious for controlling the phones on their networks. CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint don’t even use SIM cards, controlling access directly through hardware.
At best OpenMoko could become a way for activists to force open these networks, assuming we get a new FCC with a different attitude about open source.
Although if OpenMoko can find some success in more open markets, the argument will be much easier to make. Anyone here think that’s possible?
And, yes, it does look kind of iPhone-ish. (Is that even a word?)
June 21st, 2007
The telecomm revolution will not be televised
Maria Bartiromo of CNBC ticked me off the other day.
It was in her introduction to the NxtComm show in Chicago, the successor show to Supercomm. She breathlessly described how “the industry’s heavyweights” were there to “decide on the future of telecommunications.”
But the future doesn’t come from there anymore.
The future is coming from small outfits like Digium, which sells equipment and services around the Asterisk open source PBX. Founder Mark Spencer gave me a call, and I think I learned more in those few minutes than Bartiromo offered her audience all day.
“The large carriers have Asterisk in their lab. Some of them have it in field test, or tucked away in their network,” he said. “It’s smaller outfits which are coming up with the innovations, like systems to let people win eBay auctions by phone, pay parking tickets, or make international cellphone calls free.
“Next generation providers are using Asterisk to provide a better experience for the customer,” he explained. “Larger companies see the same opportunity and want to deploy the services they can dream up. The big question is will the large carriers be able to move fast enough from a lab to a service deployment before the next generation carriers get there?”
Some folks think so. Avaya just got an $8.2 billion private equity buy-out. Spencer has a different view of where change will come from.
“Asterisk has just 500 individual contributors of any consequence, and maybe just a few dozen really active contributors. But because of the flexibility of the platform, because of the size of the ecosystem, it’s able to displace these platforms” from Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel and Nortel.
“There are now two next generation mobile handsets in development. What’s exciting about them is you could have an open source handset combined with an open source switch to allow innovation to exist between the two.”
That, I submit is the future. Maria can have her heavyweights. My money is on the lightweights, and open source. The telecomm revolution will not be televised.
June 20th, 2007
Open spectrum is why the iPhone will fail
Until Larry Dignan pointed it out, I had not realized just how busy we ZDNet bloggers had gotten in talking about the Apple iPhone.
It’s hardware, it’s proprietary, so I really planned on keeping my mouth shut about it. But there is one point I have decided to make, one related directly to this beat, which is the real reason I believe the iPhone will, at best, disappoint in the market.
Open spectrum. We don’t have much, and we are nowhere near getting more.
That’s why the iPhone will fail. It is tied to a proprietary network, that of AT&T, which doles out bandwidth with an eyedropper, and charges users out the wazoo for the privilege.
AT&T can do this because our political leaders, in this decade, have endorsed a telecom oligopoly in which it pays companies to restrict supplies, prevent choice, and treat consumers with utter contempt.
AT&T is not alone in this. All of the major cellular carriers are the same way. This despite repeated spectrum auctions in which scads of bandwidth have supposedly been made available.
There’s no secret to what happened. Those auctions were gamed, by these same companies, so they could retain their positions in the market and so that competitors could be kept out. I don’t blame them for that, it’s what Bells do. I blame the government, but more than that I blame the voters and industry which let them do it.
As seen on TV, the iPhone downloads songs, videos, and scads of data with ease, and sports a great touchscreen user interface. But if you can’t afford in a month to do what the commercial does in 30 seconds, are you going to even try?
Free the bits and we’ll have progress. We’ll have the iPhone, we’ll have 10, 20, 50 megabit per second downloads, we’ll have all the innovation you could ever want. Keep them imprisoned and we’ll remain stuck in the past, while other nations go rocketing ahead of us on the wings of open source, and open spectrum.
If it takes the failure of the iPhone to get this through voters’ heads, then it’s a sacrifice well worth making.
End of rant.
June 13th, 2007
WiFi is the open source technology of the decade
To me, the best open source technology of this whole decade is WiFi.
Without it, I wouldn’t be posting this.
Since a lightning strike knocked out my wired Internet service a few nights ago I have been coming to you from inside a coffee shop a mile from home called Gathering Grounds. (Last evening, by the way, I posted from a nice little bar called the U-Joint.)
The morning rush is over, and two cops chit-chat near the window while I work at a well-lit desk in the back. The network comes on automatically, as my PC boots up, and the signal is as strong as the caffe mocha beside me.
There are thousands of shops like this around the U.S., quiet little cubbyholes which also serve as remote offices for telecommuters. Efforts by bookstores and coffee chains to charge for network access have been less successful, and why not? I’m paying $4/hour — that’s what my mocha costs, with tax.
This fact illustrates an important point about open source business models. They don’t look straightforward, but they work. I buy coffee for a desk and some network time. My presence helps attract casual drinkers to the shop during slack periods – the place is never empty.
While WiFi speeds have increased by a factor of 10 in this decade, thanks to technology, the frequency space available to it has not increased at all. Instead, the government persists in “auctioning” spectrum to cellular companies, who hoard it and sell bandwidth through an eye-dropper.
It works for them, because consumers who want truly mobile phone service (increasingly, any service at all) have few choices.
This, too, illustrates an important point. Proprietary models mainly benefit the proprietors. They are inherently political — anyone who thinks the FCC is a non-political body is drinking something much stronger than a caffe mocha (with whipped cream and chocolate sauce).
We can choose the proprietary model, with its slow speeds, lack of competition and high prices. Or we can choose the open source model, expanding the unlicensed spectrum, creating competition through equipment and service.
Your choice. Me, I’m having another mocha.
May 23rd, 2007
Open source and the attention economy
With the continued growth of the open source economy we in the media find our job is to pay attention.
This is not what’s best for our financial health. I have found that most stories I write about small open source start-ups go unread and unremarked upon.
On the other hand, all I have to do is write the magic word “Microsoft” and the money flows like wine. Even valid stories may be ignored if you’re just using e-mails and phone calls.
Thus people go the extra mile. Yesterday Funambol wanted me to know about a deal it made with Earthlink, making its open source address book available across all customer platforms, using its SyncML. Nice, but who is going to get excited and write-in about that?
Well, how about if Funambol brings t-shirts touting open source to a Microsoft ISV conference? How about if CEO Fabrizio Capobianco wears one? Will that get you excited?
Yawn.
OK, try this instead. When a former Nortel subsidiary agreed to let Fonality send out a press release on its new Asterisk-based phone system, the former corporate parent forced it to turn around, and then sought to pull back the press release (and the story). The whole thing got Slashdotted.
Now, that’s going to create a blogswarm.
I guess the lesson here is that, if you want publicity (and the positive attention which goes with it) you’re much better off getting yourself slapped by Steve Ballmer upside the head than just wearing a t-shirt to his developer’s conference.
Not that I recommend it. Ballmer’s got a big right hand.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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