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Is the telephone industry ready for open source?

Ben Charny CNET News.com

Published: 10 Jun 2005 11:40 BST

Is the telephone industry ready for open source?
Spencer: There will always be room for proprietary software. But there are certain characteristics that predispose a market to open source. One is the size of the market; telecom is enormous. Secondly, there's got to be an audience with a high degree of technical skills. Telecom people are much more technical than most others.

What's the ultimate place for Linux in telecommunications?
Spencer: Look at what happened to the personal computer. In the 1980s, there was only so much you could do on a PC. Spreadsheets, word processing -- it was fairly limited....Now supercomputers are running on AMD 64 architecture and Linux. Most of the proprietary architectures got pushed farther out to the fringe of technologies. That's what we'll see with Asterisk.

There don't seem to be a lot of developers writing PBX applications. So how can Asterisk grow new features very quickly?
Spencer: The technical nature of the audience makes the difference. In 1998, I created an instant-message client that's very popular, maybe 2 million users. But just a few dozen developers are contributing their work back into the open source community. At 200,000 installations, Asterisk has 300 contributing developers.

You've written your own Internet phone protocol, IAX, to compete with the very popular Session Initiation Protocol. Why?
Spencer: When I came out with IAX, the SIP standard was around but was not very well deployed or anything like that. It wasn't necessarily developed as a competitor to SIP. But SIP was designed to do more than make phone calls, and it's suffered because of its complexity. There's more than 2,000 pages of SIP specs. It's unimaginable how it's ended up in this mess. There are people that want something simpler.

But is anybody using IAX? And how so?
Spencer: Global Crossing uses IAX for its last-mile connection, and SIP for inside the network.