by alec on January 4, 2007
I had a quick chat with Russ Shaw this afternoon. In addition to his VoIP duties, Russ runs the BBHub blog, a site for all things Blackberry. I asked him if he could help recruit some folks to play with iotum Talk-Now, the Blackberry application we’ve been building. He’s posted a message to the world inviting early adopters to play with what we think is a revolutionary “New Presence” application. Only available on Blackberry 8700 and Pearl. To sign up, visit http://www.iotum.com/blackberry.
by alec on January 4, 2007
There’s a goofy debate going on in the Asterisk community which ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn has written about. On the one hand, open source advocates say that Asterisk really is open source. After all, you can download the source code, and, well… change it, say…
Then there are a bunch of people who are saying — “hey, it’s not open enough unless the protocols are open”. Michael Slavitch goes further saying “Asterisk isn’t even an open SIP switch, it is a VOIP PBX that must translate SIP into its own media format, and is highly biased towards the use of proprietary hardware from Digium.”
Now, I know Slavitch a little, and as one of ObjectWorld’s leading strategists, I know that he knows that SIP is a signalling protocol, and not a media protocol. The statement attributed to him is clearly nonsensical.Â
Let’s suppose, though, that Asterisk did translate an open protocol into some internal format. Who would care? Moreover, if you really did find it objectionable, it’s open source. You can just… change it.
Arguing over the degree of openness of Asterisk is like arguing over whether sugar cones are better with sprinkles or without. The raison d’etre of a sugar cone is the ice cream, n’est ce pas?
