Open Source VoIP: VON Europe conference

VON Europe Autumn – a European event where people from all over the world talked about where IP communications is going in Europe – today guested the “Open Source VoIP” conference.

The conference “Open Source VoIP, sustainability of OS project in the business sector” was aimed at discovering how open source VoIP applications are doing in the ICT market.
Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall, President of the Linux International association, opened the conference talking about “Telephone, Free Software and Emerging Economies“, introducing the audience to the Free Software and raising some important questions about emerging economies.

Jon Hall MaddogJon Hall Maddog by Pizel y Dixel

Alfonso Fuggetta spoke about Open Source business models. He raised interesting issues related to false myths, like the software commoditization. He eventually ended saying that proprietary and open source firms are offering basically the same services, despite Jon and I were giving him evidence of the opposite.

Greg VanceDigium Sales Manager – brought the discussion on a practical ground talking about “Asterisk: an OS project that has become mainstream. What’s new“, telling us about the product and the company, included the new CEO and other open positions. I asked him about Digium’s revenue and I learned that 85% of their incomes gets from hardware, than training, services and double-licensing do the rest.

The co-founder of the OpenSer project Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, who magicly appeared from nowhere when was his turn, talked about “The OpenSer: from Universities to industrial applications”. It amazed me to know how spread is the usage of the OpenSer, especially by universities but not limited to them.

Diego Gosmar gave a speech entitled “Beyond the Asterisk World..what’s around“, giving a good picture of the Asterisk ecosystem, made by many local small firms delivering basic services (installation, configuration, etc). We agreed that there is a need for a better organized ecosystem, going beyond the Asterisk partnership program, may be through marketplaces or productizing services.

A Questions&Answers session was held at the very end of the conference, resulting in questions about GPL licensing. As a matter of fact, the public is getting more and more conscious about open source applications and pose practical questions.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Open Source SIP, Open Source PBX, Asterisk, OpenSer , JonHallMaddog, AlfonsoFuggetta, Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, RobertoGaloppini