Open Sourcing Twitter Apps

I know it's only a tiny app, but I've had people ask me about how I created the Twitter apps to post the latest football scores (e.g. http://twitter.com/arsenal_scores) so having a bit of extra time (no pun intented) this week I decided to grab the latest copy and put in on Google Code. It serves another purpose as I hadn't backed it up, so now it's in source control and I can point people to it who are interested.

Tuck in - all 3kb of it.

http://code.google.com/p/latestscorestwitter/

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.

Vlogging the anwser to TV reborn? Get out of town!

The panel in this session were rambling on about video blogging with a bunch of web apps which I won't mention here. Don't get me wrong, this is relevant, the fact you can do an interview on a phone and publish it is freaking cool. However, this session titled "TV Reborn" sounded like it should have been a discussion on how media companies can play with the web and they failed to deliver!

I asked a question (heartbeat++++): "you've talked a lot about video blogging, but what about open source film like A Swarm of Angels and content providers giving it up like Star Wars Mashups?"

The answer was summed up by Paul Downey on Twitter.

The panel didn't understand the question, and I was largely ignored. It's not that these guys don't get it, but (a Phillipe Stark saying coming up) they are walking and looking at their feet.

[edit]

thanks to Phil Hawksworth for capturing this photo:


[edit2]

Here's the video, goto 41 minutes to see my question:

http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.394193

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.

Open Source: consumer vs creator (more thoughts)

I had some more thoughts on my earlier entry regarding those who make it their business to sell products that solve common business problems. There's plenty of examples from operatoring systems to specific industry solutions.

These do range from consumer (as in retail) to business and as such have different market stratgeies and such. I was wondering if it would depend what market you were in to how your open source strategy would be implemented.

If you solve a common problem, should you open source it, sell it or shelf it?

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.

Software Engineering as a Service

From the blogs I read and the people I talk to, I get the impression there's a ever growing movement of open source, free software delivered over the internet. The web is for everyone and owned by no-one is just one phrase which has added to this movement recently. I think it's fantasic; I can't think of many industries where people come together and passioned debates about the work we do, how we do it and the tools we use. Someone has to pay for it somewhere along the lines though right? I mean, if I write the next cool app, who's going to put food on my table? I think more and more, developers are having these great conversations and they're about making the development experience for other developers easier and better, simple and open always wins as they say. Although developers have a big say, and as Tim O'Reilly pointed out with alpha geeks they tend to pull the industry along somewhat, it's businesses who pay for applications, products and services. So, although we care about developers, we still have to be mindful of businesses.



I suppose a question to ask is: who is our customer?