Open source telephony gives customers control, consultant says, Dec 18, 2007

Thomas Howe is a telecommunications developer and consultant who is passionate about the role of open source software in the telephony industry. He calls open source the "next generation" of telecommunications, and works with large enterprise companies to help them design phone systems that fully integrate with their business flow. "Only open source can do that," Howe says.

The New York Times likes open source -- so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, it is nurturing a Web development team that has released two of its own open source projects.

Dimdim calls itself the world's first free Web meeting service based on an open source platform. Users can share their desktops and files while chatting and videoconferencing with meeting participants. Dimdim was originally licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), but the possibility of a big deal with a university made Dimdim executives eventually change to the GNU General Public License (GPL) instead. By changing the software's license from the MPL to the GPL, "we are making it easier for the community to use our product," says Dimdim founder DD Ganguly.

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.

Lately, however, more and more companies are discovering that they have alternatives when it comes to choosing an IT infrastructure, and that there really are some sound reasons not to go with Windows.

Faced with a choice between adding more HP-UX and Solaris boxes, or moving to Intel hardware with Linux, CitiStreet chose the latter. Today the company is enjoying enhanced stability and security, and drastically lower costs.

GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

In 2003 and 2004, Jeff Schroeder served in the Iraq war, flying a tiny remote control spy plane and servicing Unix and Linux systems on the battlefield.

Ryan Cloke's vision is to do business in a "better way." He's the owner of TheLinuxStore.ca, a Web site that sells low-cost Linux CDs, laptops, and custom workstations. This morning, to fulfill his vision, he began distributing free CDs of popular distributions like Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, and Knoppix. The response has been overwhelming.

National Lampoon, a venerated venue of collegiate comedy, stopped publishing its print magazine seven years ago, and needed an online home to make available its vast archive of articles, videos, graphics, and music.

To promote the upcoming release of Mandriva Linux 2007, Mandriva today announced a contest to find the best session startup and logoff music for the new release and all subsequent 2007 updates.

When Backcountry.com, an outdoor sporting goods retailer, was looking for shopping cart software, it picked an open source application called Interchange. It worked so well that the company began an enterprise-wide migration to open source software that has Linux running everywhere, from the servers to the desktops.

Kevin Mauldin's younger brother Gary was CEO of Denver-based La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries, an independent four-store retailer of La-Z-Boy, Inc. furniture. When Gary died in 2002 as the result of complications from an accident, Kevin inherited the CEO's job and an IT infrastructure that had been built from scratch by his technologically talented sibling. Unfortunately, it was such a patchwork of disparate technologies that no one else could easily sort it out. Mauldin decided on an IT overhaul, aimed at planting La-Z-Boy firmly on a Linux foundation.

Linux users who live in Toronto now have a special place to gather, get online, and sip fancy coffee drinks. It's not Starbucks, it's the linuxcaffe.

Walden Media, the company that produced The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, wanted a community-driven Web site that would encourage discussion and collaboration on the educational products related to its movies. After considering the options, Walden Media chose Liferay's MIT-licensed open source content management system (CMS), running on Linux.

Bryant University in Rhode Island was ranked the the "second most connected campus in America" by the Princeton Review in October 2004. The school offers a wide variety of Web services, including online registration and course materials, a digital asset library, and a large interconnected campus, and they're all powered by Linux.

Cuestas saw in the marketplace what he considered a convergence of Dell, Red Hat, and Oracle, so he made what he calls the "logical decision" and unified the shop onto Red Hat.

FLHurricane.com is one of the most popular tropical weather blogs in existence. It gets millions of hits during hurricane season, serves up gigabytes of image data, and runs on custom software and Linux.

Laszlo Systems, the creator and sponsor of the OpenLaszlo platform for Web application development, has hired Kent Libbey away from Microsoft to fill the position of chief marketing officer.

Both Microsoft and the OSDL have been pretty tight-lipped about the discussions held during a LinuxWorld meeting between Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, Martin Taylor, and the OSDL's CEO Stuart Cohen. However, late last week the OSDL forwarded us a statement from Cohen that explains some of the silence.