Open Source Call Control and Text to Speech Makes CallFlow Release

It's an exciting time at work, we've 'officially' released Aloha, our Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Application Server as an open source project. We also released text to speech as a feature of CallFlow into our sandbox environment. Why do I think this is exciting? Well, several months ago I blogged about 'is it good enough to consume open source without contributing?', and I think this shows where we stand on that discussion.

Now, SIP servers may not mean a lot to many people, but it really should be a comodoity piece of software and this goes back to a blog I mentioned in the link above from JP, Build vs Buy vs Open Source. I think it's great to share so here is out effort, I don't know if it will get any uptake, but it'll be fun finding out.

In other news, there was some cool new features added to CallFlow during the Web21C release today. It's been pretty fun working on such a novel voice application with text to speech the obvious highlight. In fact, I wrote about it on my work blog.

Finally, I've been putting together a paper based on experiences developing Aloha with Rags and Fab. If you're interested, you can read the submission.

SDPs and other acronyms

Acronyms have always filled me with fear ever since my university Software Engineering class where we'd read case studies but with the names changed in a humourous way, like SNAPPERS for an automated processed through a photography lab. What it stands for now escapes me, but leaves me frightened nether-the-less. The telco industry is filled with them, the software industry has plenty go spare too and I'm stuck in the middle.

After reading JPs recent entry about the word 'platform' now being an overloaded word, I remembered what the telco industry was currently going through. I get the impression sometimes that in the industry if it's not worth putting a committee together to solve a problem, then there is no problem.

Take your typical Service Delivery Platform (SDP), talk about a problem that doesn't need solving! SDPs are specific to the telco industry according to Wikipedia. But, why are they specific? If SDPs are so central to (and I cringe as I type this) 'Telco 2.0' why isn't anyone else doing it? Why can't I just buy one? For that matter, why isn't there an open source SDP I can run?

I really like Urmy's "complex is lots of simple" approach. I look at some of the newish companies coming out and they seem to have something in common. David James said something which stuck with me about making your product x, the best damm product x anyone has seen. Take Twitter for example, what they do is really good, and it's simple to use and code against.

When building a generic framework, I'd like to see lots of loosely connected, easy to use web APIs to make it so easy to plug an application together, you could build it before you had time to put a committee together. Yes, those newish start ups do have the luxury of having no legacy systems like telco's do, but that doesn't give anyone permission to shroud those legacy systems in the mysteries of acronyms.

Buying, Building and Open Sourcing

Stumbled across this great little post on Try Before You Buy Marketing, thanks to Doc Searls Thankslinking. It got me thinking about companies selling products they don't use themselves, there's got to me loads out there. Equally, there must be loads of companies that have products which are used within the company network that could be sold or open sourced, as well as companies who spend fortunes on buying products that could be obtained from the open source community.

Madness.

Anonymity, Freedom of speech and privacy on the web

Is it everyones right to be anonymous online?

I was pointed to a discussion going on at getsatisfaction.com about Facebook users not being able to sign up with 'fake names'. Really, who is Facebook to judge such things? I have friends who sign up to most things with a fake name and email address specifically to not give away personal information. Who cares?

In my previous post I discussed the use of inner dialogs spilling out onto the web giving everyone a voice. Though the volume of randomness is extremely high (my RSS reader constantly tells me I've got more then a 1000 items to read, yikes!) everyone deserves a voice. We may choose to not listen, but that's another matter.

Like an employee kept behind a firewall during their 9-5, do they have a right to discuss their opinions openly on the web and do that in an anonymous way?

Others are framing what I think is the same scenario differently, JP talks about openness rather then anonymity while David Weinberger goes more into depth on the Facebook ad platform regarding privacy.

An interesting comeback, as I'm reading Cluetrain Manifesto at the moment (finally), and Chris Locke is talking about his struggles to get his voice heard while at IMB. Being locked down by the corporation, Chris resorted to anonymous mailing list/early blogs to get his views across.

Certainly, when I started using the web, I used psudeo names when I posted on message boards and even when I started blogging here. I'm not so anonymous anymore, but that's my choose and my decision to make, not any one application or business.

Open Source: consumer vs creator

Talk of "we do open source" or "we need to embrace open source" and lots of other comments at an open source awareness day at work yesterday made me think. What makes an individual, or company "open source" friendly?

I think I may have been guilty of some naivety around consumers of open source. I've heard some people be openly proud of the consumptive use of open source, but is it good enough to only be a consumer?

JP Rangaswami's blog post on 'Build vs Buy vs Opensource' springs to mind. Let's take in a few examples, and yes, they will be simple, as I'm simple minded ;)

Company A has a business problem that needs solving and they download a bunch of open source tools and applications (web servers and the like) and write a bit of custom code and make a custom application that solves that problem. Cool, well done.

Company B has a similar problem, but this time they sell that application as a vendor . OK, that's all well and good they've got costs to cover and if there's a market that's willing to pay then their analysts have done their job.

Now, what if both products from company A and B become common problems in themselves. Do they have a responsibility to open those products up? Perhaps responsibility is the wrong word, there may be circumstances (not red take circumstances that is) that makes this not the case, but do they at least have a moral obligation as a consumer to at least consider opening up?

Perhaps later, company A build a new product completely from scratch. If that becomes a common problem later, do they have any more reason to open source?

I suppose what I'm trying to ask is, is it enough as a creator to be a consumer of open source software to say "I'm open source friendly"?

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Oh, and if you didn't attend, the take away was definitely PSDs poster.