I came across this interesting article detailing an interview with Thomas Howe, a telecommunications consultant who is passionate about the role open source software plays in the telephony industry. Howe has been using open source for decades, earning his baptism by fire fooling around with GCC compilers. He’s also a big fan of Asterisk, an open source telephony engine that many companies are adopting these days as they look to save money via legacy telephony replacements. In the article, Howe says that customers “don’t care” whether the solution is open source or not. “As a small shop and as a consultant, using open source gives me the ability to make solutions rapidly that are custom. No one else can provide them. And as time goes on, open source is more viable than vendor-supplied technology, and it’s more reliable.”
On a separate but related note, Asterisk is an interesting company, and one that I’m very familiar with from my days at CRM magazine. Asterisk was the industry’s first open source PBX, developed by Digium and provided free of charge. The impetus behind Digium, and thus Asterisk, can be traced to Mark Spencer, the 28-year old founder and current CTO of Digium, and an Auburn University engineering student that used Linux to code the solution in 1999 while in college.
So why the two tales? Because I found these both seemingly unrelated stories a lighthearted example of one of open source’s biggest advantages: sheer flexibility and community development to create better software. At one end of the spectrum, an industry veteran, and at the other a college graduate, representing both the new and best that open source has to offer.
