Nope. The blog doesn’t have a cold. Those are the names of some of the open source projects that Om Malik has highlighted in his latest story on the impact of open source in the telecoms world. Or at least, Snort and XORP are… there is no sniffle to my knowledge.
There’s no doubt that open source is wreaking havoc in many industries. At iotum, our servers are all built on open source — Linux, MySQL, python, Nagios. We use Asterisk in house for our PBX as well. You can build commercial grade systems from these parts with ease.
The reaction to open source varies dramatically from business to business. Most people assume it’s a threat. However, that’s not always the case. Last night I had dinner with the CTO of a very large PBX manufacturer. We talked about Asterisk at length. His assessment? Call control has become a commodity. If he can outsource it to an open source project, it lets him assign resources to the far more lucrative applications market, which is what customers are asking for.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
