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When I started using Open Source software, it seemed like all Open Source projects are driven by philanthropic agendas. We were all focused on “sticking it to the man” – showing all these would be software vendors that community driven projects can do just as well – if not better.

"When I was a child I spoke as a child I
understood as a child I thought as a child;
but when I became a man I put away childish
things." - I Cor. xiii. 11.

Well, I’m not claiming that Open Source is childish – absolutely not, however, when you are a student you tend to look at things in one way, when you have a family to care for – you start looking at things differently. You remember these days in life when your dad said: “When you’ll have children you will understand” – well, now I do.

So, what am I rambling about exactly? I’ll tell you. The day before Passover I attended several meetings, which when I came back home had pissed me off immensely. I feel an urge to write all about these meetings, including who I met exactly, however – I won’t do that. However, I will give a rough idea of these.

Meeting 1 : A world recognized Mobile application player

I came into the meeting with this company, where the CTO of the company explained to me that they are looking to create an Asterisk based solution for their application’s users. My initial question was: how many users? what is your concurrency level? – The answer that I got was: “Oh, we don’t need something major, just a few lines of configurations in Asterisk config files in order to make this work”.

I left the meeting slightly pissed off, thinking to myself: “You bloody inconsiderate prick! You bring me to a meeting, spend my time – and then telling me that this is just a few lines of configuration. If it is that simple, why don’t you do it yourself? you have 20 developers in there, 4 IT people and god knows how many outsourced workers off-shore – if it was that simple, you would have done it already – so probably it isn’t – right?”

Meeting 2 : A well established IVR services vendor

The second meeting was with a well established IVR content vendor, this company runs around 16M minutes of inbound IVR traffic every month. They invited me in order to talk about expanding into new countries, wishing to get premium based access numbers in various countries. So, we started talking, and the guy indicates that he wants a certain kick-back payout, which I know is impossible – at least without charging the user more. Actually, the guy indicated that out of the interconnect fee, he wants to get almost 90% as a kick back.

Meeting 3 : A start up rendering IVR content

The third meeting was the most amazing one – these guys wanted to build an Asterisk system to server around 4000 concurrent channels – outsource the entire development to my company – and pay as a revenue share. When I asked for their business model, marketing plan, investors, profiles – I got a response of – we don’t yet have all of these, we only have an idea at this point that we want to implement.

Garage based companies are built by people who can do the work themselves, not the other way around.

At this point, you are probably asking yourself: “What does this have to do with the title?” – Well, all of these meetings had one thing in common. The people I met were under the impression that Open Source is some form of philanthropy. Or to be more exact, people who deal with the Open Source market are philanthropists. My question is this: “Why are we perceived as philanthropists? don’t we have families to care for? don’t we need to pay mortgages and bills just like everybody else?”. I guess when people read about the various Open Source entrepreneurs, such as Mark Shuttleworth – the immediately associate Open Source with Big Exists – this is not the case.

At some level, this is purely our fault – we educated people that Open Source is a highly economical methodology of solving technical challenges. No where along the way, had we educated the public that behind the model there are people, people who need to make a living.

If you are an Open Source consultant, developer, evangelist or just someone who may have an opinion on this, I’d love to read what you say.

Well, it’s been almost a month since I’ve started writing about the humbug project. Now, it’s time to actually get you people involved, at least in the initial levels. We are looking to add 10 additional members into the humbug call analytics suite. Currently available analytics during the alpha testing is inbound call analytics.

Our aim is to gather as much information as we can and as much user requests as we can, humbug is a community oriented project, thus it relies on community oriented input and feature requests. Participating members will  be granted access to the humbug analytics portal, allowing them to gather statistical information regarding their inbound call hits and their top ten DID numbers – we are working on additional statistics. As new stats will become available, we’ll role those out into the service as soon as possible.

In order to participate in the closed alpha testing, please send an email to alphatest at humbuglabs.org, and we’ll send you a short piece of dialplan code to insert into your Asterisk server. Technically speaking, we’ll send you a short AGI command that looks like this:

exten => _X.,n,AGI(agi://somehost/DataReceiver,some_unique_ident)

The above line needs to be inserted into any place you would like to generate call analytics from. We’ll also enclose configuration steps for FreePBX (and other FreePBX compatible distributions). We are hard at work for creating a FreePBX integrated module, so you can do a one-click install.

Today I got the chance to speak at a Polycom half-day convention, mainly to speak about Asterisk and HDvoice. Now, putting aside the part about HDvoice (I’m getting a post about that on its own), I gotten to the point where I believe that I’m currently perceived as being an eccentric.

So, why am I eccentric? very simple, I’ve reached a point where I can say things that may be perceived as rude – and write it off an being an eccentric quirk.

I’ve talked about Asterisk ability to support Video, while the current Polycom VVX1500 video phone isn’t yet supported at its fullest. One of the people in the crowd mentioned some sleezy,al-cheapo, SIP Video phone (to be more exact, he’s the local distributor) – and I claimed that I don’t count that phone as a comparison to Polycom or other VoIP Video phones, simply because in my view it’s not a worth while comparison. Comm’on, let’s be realistic, can you compare a Polycom VVX1500 (an HDvoice Video phone) with some shitty sub-VGA SIP Video phone from China? the mere comparison is simply insulting for Polycom.

Shortly after negating that phone, the person stood up and left the room. At the break, a friend said to me that I shouldn’t have said that, in order to come out the bigger man. Common, the guy is surely making a joke of himself. I commented: “I’ve said what I said, I stand by my opinion – besides, you know I’m eccentric – eccentric people say eccentric things” – he agreed that I’m eccentric, after all, you can’t be an Open Source evangelist without being an eccentric – now can you?

Well, I guess it’s time for another Israeli Asterisk update post – one that was well due a long time now. This post was written after the recent hectic 3 weeks of Asterisk events and news here in Israel. So, I guess we’ll open with some news – beep, beep, beep.

Asterisk based Contact Centers

EasyRun, a world wide provider of Call Center and Contact Center solutions had announced the availability of its EpicAcce solution.

EasyRun Partners with Xorcom to Offer the Industry’s First Enterprise Grade PBX Agnostic Contact Center

EPICAcce Delivers the Industry’s First PBX Agnostic Enterprise Grade Contact Center Solution

For those in the know, the EpicAcce solution is based upon the Asterisk Open Source PBX system, bundled inside a Xorcom XR3000 appliance. I’m proud to say that I had some involvement in the development of this product, mainly, having trained the EasyRun lead developers in the workings of Asterisk – in the first Asterisk Bootcamp that was held in Israel last year. The EpicAcce appliance is defined as a PBX agnostic contact center solution, thus, it will work in any type of PBX or enterprise installation – making it the ideal solution for any company wishing to embed a contact center to their customer care, without the requirement of changing their entire company telephony infrastructure. In addition, the same unit can also be used as a the company PBX system – after all, it is based on Asterisk underneath and FreePBX as the management interface for Asterisk.

Asterisk gains recognition by the TheMarker.Com

About 3 weeks ago, I got interviewed by Amitai Ziv, a telecom reported from the TheMarker.Com IT news section. The interview (in hebrew) is available at the following URL:

http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/6255

Now, while the article had mentioned about 25% of the actual interview and also summed up various statements from other people two, in general, it was very supportive of the Asterisk initiative and movement in Israel. I guess, well at least from my point of view, this article is a valid turning point – where the Israeli main stream industry acknowledges Asterisk as a valid business viable solution. In addition, as the founding father of the Israeli Asterisk users forum (www.asterisk.org.il) it is a great honor to be interviewed for this magazine. Sure, I make a living from promoting Asterisk and developing Asterisk based platforms, but having your face (although a horid picture) in the paper and having your name mentioned in a positive manner – is always a good thing.

Israeli Telecom Manager Club recognizes Asterisk

Yesterday I attended the “Israeli Telecom Manager’s Club” quarterly meeting, which was focused entirely on the viability of Asterisk and other Open Source based solutions. While most of the audience was made of large companies and captains of industry (Coca-Cola, TEVA, Israeli Electric Company, others) – I didn’t get the dreaded lazy eye I got almost 3 years ago.

When I started promoting Asterisk in Israel, almost 7 years ago, people looked at me as the crazy guy that has no idea what he was talking about. After all, I was an IP/Web technologies engineer, suddenly, starting to talk about telephony – in a world where 50 year old engineers were controlling and dominating entirely. Suddenly, a new kid on the block comes in and says: “Listen, Open Source can do it as good – if not better“. Yesterday was a turning point, suddenly, all these people came in to listen to me, preach and promote, both Asterisk and proper Open Source adoptation and GPL compliancy.

Israel is changing, companies start realizing that using GPL and modifying GPL products isn’t something to be taken lightly – it must be done with experts, and people that actually know what they are doing in the Open Source world. The old time Open Source geeks are starting to gain the industry recognition – Israel is finally starting to reach the state where the US and Europe are currently located at.

Digium announces availability of Support Services

This is not the first time Digium had tried doing this – first time was about 2.5 years ago. The current support services are based upon a signed service agreement, allowing the customer to receive phone based support services. According to the Digium website, the pricing model is as following:

                               SMB L1   SMB L2   Enterprise L3   Enterprise L4
Included Systems (Servers)        1         1          Up to 5         Up to 10
Included Cases (Incidents)        2         5             10           Unlimited
Additional Server Price           —         —          $495.00         $395.00
Named Contacts                    1         1             1                3
Price - 1 Year Subscriptions   $595.00  $1,995.00     $3,995.00        $7,995.00

Ok, not that I have a problem with that – I guess in the world people are willing to pay upto 300$ for a support incident – however, in Israel, that makes no sense. Judging from my experience supporting Asterisk, over 90% of the support calls can be resolved in less than 30 minutes. Charging an amazing price of 300$ for remote hands support, for an incident of 30 minutes – that is outragous. It’s true, I’m a Digium fan and I promote their products where ever I go, however, in Israel – this model will not cut it.

My company, started rendering Asterisk support services in Israel back in December 2008. Our support model is completely different – making it ideal for the Israeli market. Our support model is based upon a base line service agreement, indicating that you pay a total of 2,300 Israeli Shekels (around $500) for up to 10 hours of phone based and remote hands support services. These are rendered for a single server only – additional servers will cost you a couple hundrad more shekels, but the overall agreement in terms of time remains in tact. People in Israel know that support cases happen once every few months, so paying an identical price for getting 2 incidents handled simply doesn’t make any sense in the Israeli Market.

TDM400 Compatible GSM Module

ASTERISK GSM MODULE

A new product on the market introduces a GSM module to the ever popular Digium TDM400P card. The new module, available at http://www.asteriskgsmmodule.com/index.html is a plug-in for the TDM400P card, allowing it to accept a GSM SIM card – instead of the standard FXO module.

Finally, a plug-in for Asterisk that negates the need to work with a GSM converter. The bad thing is that it requires a patch to the wctdm.c Zaptel driver, and aparently, isn’t yet available for DAHDI at all – but I guess this will be fixed in the short future. I surely hope that these guys will contact Digium and maybe introduce the driver into the main stream driver distro, after all, Digium doesn’t make GSM modules – so it’s no competing with any Digium product.

Well, it’s finally out – my new book that is

Some of you already know, but over the past year I’ve been busy writing a new book. This time it’s a book for Asterisk developers, especially tailored to PHP developers wishing to utilizing the PHPAGI framework. The book is out from Packt Publishing (Like my old AsteriskNOW book) and is updated with all the recent changes in Asterisk – including version 1.6.X and DAHDI.

Asterisk Developers Book

If you like my work with Asterisk and would like to read more of my work, go ahead and get an electronic version of this book. I know it’s a little self promoting, by hey, it never hurts does it?

I’ve included a chapter on how to build a complete project from scratch, detailing the various analysis steps and various paradigms required to develop a fully functional Asterisk based application. I believe that even experienced Asterisk developers will benefit from this book.

The Open Source movement had been in existence since the 60′s, and we can surely find its roots somewhere along the hippie culture and movement. While Free-Love had transcended to Free-Code, or to be more exact – Free-Knowledge, the question of the sources for your Open Source is still questionable. Comparing it with the Sixties, it’s easy to compare the various “Free-Love” movements with the various “Open Source Paradigms” of today. While GPL, BSD, MPL, ZPL and others preach for Open Source adaptation – each one took a different path.

While the paths differ, but the end result is more or less the same, all suffer from a serious lack – a bad reputation. While in the early 2000, Open Source usually meant – highly stable, state of the art technology, increased ROI, lowered TCO and most importantly for many – COOL. Coming 2008, Open Source is starting to get a bad rep, due to the ever increasing simplicity of entering the Open Source world.

I started using Linux somewhere around 1994. My first Linux distribution was a Slackware, with a kernel of 1.0.28 – I needed 99 floppy disks in order to install the system, and it took me a few hours to do so. However, I can’t forget my amazement at seeing the X-Windows environment booting up, and more than that, being completely overwhelmed with the fact that I have a fully functional UNIX environment in my house, just like the one I had in my Army office. Now, I basically had no one to teach me this new environment, so, I had to take my UNIX skills (Solaris and AIX) and adopt to Slackware Linux – it took me a few weeks to get around, but I got around and stuck to it ever since.

Now, let’s jump 14 years forward in time. The year is 2008, a graphic based environment for Linux is no longer a myth and it is getting better and better by the day. People are starting to adopt Linux beyond the academic and the ISP market sectors, slowly integrating Linux based distributions (Mandriva, Ubutnu) on to their desktops and notebooks. Linux is become simple and appealing to everybody.

When something becomes easy to use, people make good use of it – a good example is the Asterisk project. Projects such as TrixBox (AKA: AsteriskAtHome), PBXinaFlash, AsteriskNOW and others had made Asterisk into a simple installation product, that can be installed and managed by any half-decent sysadmin. Problem is, while a half-decent sysadmin will do a fair job of maintaining the system, a shitty sysadmin will crap everything to hell. But hell, that is true for almost anything related to computers or technology – there’s nothing new here! Well, there is nothing new and everything is now new. People who were more or less selling shoes 3 years, then 2 years decided to sell ISP routers, then a year ago started selling IP phones, are now selling Asterisk based systems – using these distibutions, while having no idea what they are selling or promoting. For these people, Asterisk is nothing more beyond FreePBX – once encountering deeper issues, will simply abandon the customer – leaving the Open Source product with a bad rap with the, now disappointed, customer.

I want to believe that other places in the world are different, I want to believe that Israel will reach a point in time when this doesn’t happen – however, I guess that only time will tell and I surely hope this will change in Israel.

After seeing well too many movies about the US and after visiting the US for a few times, many people tend to disrespect the FBI in the USA. While I have much respect for most law enforcement agencies, wherever these are located in the world, I must admit, that the latest warning from the FBI regarding Asterisk borderlines pure hystria and complete misunderstanding of the actual issue.

On Dec 8th, the FBI had issued the following warning:

New Technique Utilizing Private Branch Exchange (PBX) Systems To Conduct Vishing Attacks

The FBI has received information concerning a new technique used to conduct vishingⁱ attacks. The recent attacks were conducted by hackers exploiting a security vulnerability in Asterisk software. Asterisk is free and widely used software developed to integrate PBXⁱⁱ systems with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), digital Internet voice calling services; however, early versions of the Asterisk software are known to have a vulnerability. The vulnerability can be exploited by cyber criminals to use the system as an auto dialer, generating thousands of vishing telephone calls to consumers within one hour.

http://www.ic3.gov/media/2008/081205-2.aspx

Now, after a full weekend of frenzy trying to understand the cryptic warning the IC3 had issues, it was gathered that it is referring to an old time bug, related to Asterisk distributions prior to 1.4.18. Being familiar with the particular bug and the exploitation method – I can say this: They surely have no idea what they are talking about!

The exploitation of the bug requires several pre-requirements:

• A certain IAX2 configuration has to be deployed
• A certain version of Asterisk must be used
• A certain form of dialplan has to be existing
• You Asterisk server needs to be available on the Internet

Now, even when these 4 are met, the exploitation isn’t all that simple and that straight forward. So, in other words, if you are not utilizing any of the above, you can rest assured that your system is fine. In any case, any system is as secured as the dumbest user (in our case developer/sysamdin) who uses it.

Like most of the world, I’ve been following the recent market turmoil with a great burden on my shoulder. When you think about it, I’m not a stock broker, nor am I a multi-billionaire that has his funds invested in various stocks and bonds, that a single 0.1% shift in the NASDAQ translates to millions of dollars. I’m a software developer, a freelance one, dealing in the Open Source – and like anybody else, I’m worried about how this crisis immediately affects me.

Today, I came across two items, post on www.themarker.com – Israel’s topmost Internet based financial/business daily. The two items dealt with how three of the better known VC’s in Israel had started instructing their investees to start cutting down costs – mainly, firing people. The three VC’s that I’m talking about are: Carmel Ventures, Benchmark Israel and Sequoia Capital. You are probably wondering why is this interesting? the VC’s in the item had directly instructed their investees to cut down people, costs, operational costs, loose dead weight – in other words, find ways to reduce your costs. Sequoia even out did Carmel and Benchmark, by inviting the investees to a meeting called: “RIP: Good Times”!

Shortly after I finished reading the two items, I got a phone call from a friend working at one of Sequoia’s companies (a well known one in Israel) asking me if he can come work for me. I was surprised, this is the first time I’ve ever read something in the news, and was directly affected by it. As far as I gathered, his company basically took a team of 8 people and reduced it to 2. Now, I completely understand tightening up, but running an operation on a 25% man power is stupid! Running at 50% is manageable, but 25% is down right crazy. For 2 people to do the work of 8, they would need to eat, drink, sleep, live, do everything within the office – I know, I’ve been there. During the year 2003, m-Wise was more or less in the shit. In the year 2002 I had a team that consisted of another SysAdmin and 3 more support techs. In 2003 I was left alone, and I basically did everything myself! – how crazy is that. But again, I decided that I’m not going to have a life for a certain period of time – that is all, not everybody is willing to make that sacrifice.

Now, this case goes hand in hand with my previous post – the migration to Open Source technologies is no longer a myth or a “nice-to-have” issue, it is a matter of business continuity and good expense management. Think about it, the company that fired 75% of their team, could have easily replaced part of their server infrastructure from Windows to Linux, migrate their Oracle database to PostgreSQL and save thousands and thousands of dollars a year, and maybe even save a job or two in the process.

Now, here’s what I think (and I know for fact I’m gonna get slammed here): Hey, VC’s, stop telling the companies to let go people. Sure, get rid of dead weight – no one needs those M$ based shitty, money grabbing, time consuming, hardware intensive environment. Wouldn’t it be better to not pay M$ a few ten’s of thousands of dollars a year, and maybe save a man’s job, or maybe even 2? M$ has enough money of their own, all you are doing is making sure they keep on making money, while the rest are fighting for their lives. Why don’t the VC’s hire Open Source consultants, to help them examine their investees and maybe, just maybe, they will find ways to invest their funds in a wiser way and help these companies to survive the current financial turmoil.

Lately I’ve come to the realization, that we are to blame for our own inability to promote Open Source and the adaptation of Open Source proficiency. Being an Open Source evangelist and consultant, this is very weird to be said by one like myself, however, this is my realization – and I will explain.

In the early days of Open Source adaptations (late 90′s, early 2000), Open Source software was a somewhat magical solution that meant: pay nothing, get more. Software packages like Linux, Apache, mySQL, PostgreSQL and programming languages like PERL and PHP had lowered the bar on the adaptation of new technologies, and enabled a prolific number of solutions and services.

I still remember the early days, when a Windows based Mail Relay would cost anything between 800$ to 1200$, and I would come in with a Linux based solution that would do the same thing for FREE – amazing. As time progressed, so did the technology and the penetration of Open Source into new fields. CRM, ERP, Telecoms, management – all of these now enjoy a diverse number of Open Source solutions. However, the original concept of ‘Open Source = Magical FREE Solution’ had still remained in the minds of managers and business people.

Today we are confronted with ‘would-be’ Open Source solution experts, which adopt and develop upon Open Source products and project various applications. In example, let’s take a look at Asterisk. Asterisk has a multitude of Open Source solutions, ranging from PBX system, Prepaid calling cards, Wholesale routing platforms, Attendance system, Presence systems – and even a plant watering solution. The problem with this ever growing number of solutions is that Asterisk is immediately considered to be: “A magical solution” capable of solving any problem – when it’s not even remotely related to Asterisk. For example, a friend of mine had been asked to develop an Asterisk based solution, that would support a total of 250 concurrent call initiations and up-to 3000 concurrent calls on the system. Any Asterisk developer would take a look at this, and would immediately say: “Hmmm…. this requires several servers, but hey, what about the application itself? that would also have an impact”. Now, the customer of the project has a ‘would-be’ Asterisk tech in his company which said: “I was able to initiate 200 concurrent SIP invites to Asterisk via SIPP, no problem’ – HELLO! STUPID! where’s the application? where’s the database? where’s the user information flow? comm’on, are you listening to yourself speak? or simply are filled with the gasses coming out of your ass that are affecting your brain?

Now, once the customer learns that Asterisk is most probably not the right solution for the problem, he becomes angry. Why? because he now learns that he needs to spend about 10 times more money than he anticipated for the creation of this tool – well, that’s life when you have no idea what you are doing/saying, and you believe in magical solutions. However, we – “The Open Source Community – is the one to blame for this scenario, because we got the world accustomed to the idea that Open Source is like magic – flip the Linux magic wand, and the rest will solve itself.

I’d like to open the floor for discussion on this, as I believe most of you will have something to say about this.

As some of you noticed, I’ve started a “Say No To TrixBox” campaign. In order toPL go about and monitor the usage of the banner, and it’s deployment across the net, I’ve installed an OpenX ad server to support the campaign. I guess that I didn’t realize what the little campaign would do!

Current statistics show that the banner had been deployed to over 300 different websites across the world, had been viewed over 60,000 times and had been clicked on for about 800 times. Not a bad CTR ratio for a little community oriented campaign.

If you are an Asterisk user, and you are fed up with the way Fonality/TrixBox had been conducting their business over the past 3 years, it’s time to show your support and put this banner on your website. If you have a blog, a company website, an Asterisk oriented business, show your support to FreePBX and other Open Source Asterisk oriented projects and website by showing the world that the community has power.

I am all for competition, as a healthy competition always keeps us on our toes and makes sure we always progress and improve – but Fonality/TrixBox’s actions must be denounced and rejected.

While Open Source projects around the world gather up the troops and become recognized for what they are: highly polished, highly effective, extremely economical products – the situation in Israel is fairly different. We’ve all heard about companies like Zimbra (recently acquired by Yahoo), MySQL (recently acquired by SUN) and others, which had struck BIG TIME. However, the situation in Israel differs immensely.

I’ve been invited to participate in a panel at the Garage Geeks, to discuss the various aspects of Open Source sustainability. I’ve made it my business to build a business completely surrounded by Open Source, devoted to the promotion and adaptation of Open Source – and when possible, the promotion of Open Source licensing models and the understanding of what they mean.

In one of my previous posts, I’ve indicated that Open Source projects are highly exploited in an illegal manner in Israel, thus, making Open Source business in Israel a high target for Open Crooks. The question immediately arises, how can an Open Source project become successful? In addition to that, what are the factors that make a good Open Source project a grand Open Source project.

Step 1: Features

For an Open Source project to become popular and frequently used, it should have an extensive range of features, which is constantly being upgraded and enhanced. Taking from my own personal favorite, let’s take a look at Asterisk – the Open Source PBX. Over the course of the past 5 years, Asterisk had evolved to include hundreds of features. Each new feature in an Open Source product expose it to a new market. With Asterisk, the introduction of an Answering machine detection tool had introduced it to the automatic dialer and contact center market. The introduction of LumenVox speech recognition had introduced it to the ASR market, and so on.

While features are important, it is also very important to make sure the features included are features that the community and users require. While it is really cool to have a mod_kitchensink for the Apache web server, no one really uses it.

Step 2: Community

In order for an Open Source product to become successful, it MUST have a vibrant and active community – better yet, more than one. While an active developer community is important for the advancement of the project, a set of auxiliary communities is required. A users community is a must, rendering support and usage ideas to its members. No less important is a business oriented community, one that speaks to the manager level people, those making the decisions in organizations. Tap into that level, and the Open Source project is now gaining followers from other side of the border.

Managers tend to be highly traditional in thinking, not inclined to utilize Open Source at first try. A vibrant business community of the Open Source project can do wonders to the project, especially with its promotion and adaptation into existing and new business structures.

Step 3: Funding and Sustainability

Funding an Open Source project doesn’t entirely mean – MONEY! Well, eventually it does mean money, but not in the normal way we think or work with money. Open Source developers don’t work primarily for the money, the driving force behind Open Source developers is different. Question be: “If Open Source developers aren’t motivated by money, why would you need funding?” – the reason is simple, the surroundings of an Open Source project require funding.

The surroundings of an Open Source project mainly include the following: public events, developer meetings, servers, hosting, travel fares, participating in trade shows and others. All of the above are generally associated with Marketing, however, marketing an Open Source project is sometimes as important as the project itself. If we are to examine the growth of the Linux community and user base in the world, we are mainly thankful to RedHat in its early days (1996-2001), closely followed by Debian with its recent off spring Ubuntu (2006-2008). Imagine, you can now go into an IBM dealer and ask to buy your notebook with Linux, how cool is that? how did that happen? did the world suddenly realise Linux is better than Windows? – the answer is NO! The marketing efforts of these companies had proven worth while, as the concept of using Linux as a desktop became common in recent years.

Step 4: Training and Certification

If your Open Source project is UberGeek targeted only, than you have a very slim chance of making it big. Lowering the bar on the requirements for the adaptation of an Open Source project is highly important and can be mostly achieved by training and certification. The training makes it possible for people to learn more about an Open Source project, while the certification makes the project seem more desirable and exclusive.

Why do people seek M$ and Ci$co certifications? simple, because they know these certifications mean something to manager level people and decision makers. The certification is a written (actually printed) proof that you know what you are talking about and that you are truly a professional working in the field of that Open Source project.

Conclusion:

If all of the above are met, you are surely on your way to create the next big Open Source project – and you are on your way to world fame and rock-star feeling.

OK, I’m fairly psyched out at this point, actually, I would say that I’m ecstatic. The first ever Asterisk Bootcamp training will be taking place on the 25th of May, in Ramat-Gan, and I’m the trainer

If you are not from Israel, you may regard this as: “What’s so special? Asterisk bootcamps are all over the place!” – but for me this is something really special. In 2002 I began a journey into the world of Asterisk, starting to develop various applications and voice systems based upon this wonderful piece of software. As time progressed, my interest in Asterisk grew, and thus, also my interest in the adaptation of Asterisk to Tier-1 telecom infrastructures.

In 2006 I’ve finalized my first Tier-1 Asterisk application, an International Operator Assisted Dialing platform. If you are from the telecom business, you are most probably familiar with the Nortel TOPS platform. The platform that I’ve developed replaced a Nortel TOPS system, that was installed at Bezeq International in Israel. This was the first ever Asterisk installation as a critical Tier-1 carrier service, within a Tier-1 carrier. Just to give you an idea of the big ho-ha, in Israel, this platform is a regulatory issue – no system, no license – no license, company go bye bye!

A year ago I left Atelis, the company that I help found and manage – a Digium channel and reseller in Israel and the UK. I’m now a freelance consultant/developer, focusing mainly on the integration of Asterisk in various applications and business structures. This training session, to me, is somewhat of a climactic event – as it bring my 5 years of Asterisk experience, into a situation where I can share this experience and know-how with a select group of people – who all share the same goal: they want to learn Asterisk to the fullest.

Training will begin on the 25th of May, and I will try to post each day of the bootcamp, telling you my thoughts, feelings and news from the bootcamp – I’ll even throw in some pictures to match

Ok, the service is up and running, so now I can show it off. Israel’s 60th independance day parties information service is running of an Asterisk servers – how do I know that, you ask? simple, it’s my Asterisk server!

Well, actually, the service is being run by BeLowCall, an IVR and telecom services company, while the platform was developed by me. Essentially, the system is an Asterisk based application engine, that has a very minimalistic dialplan code and communicates with an SQL backoffice then instructs the Asterisk server what to do – in turn, turning the Asterisk server into a high scaleable state transition machine – capable of developing IVR system at any depth or as wide as you want.

If you want to feel the system, you are welcome to call +972-73-2126060. The entire application took about 4 hours to provision, including the database registration system and the recording – not bad, right?

Ok, I’m a consultant and developer, but asking somebody to pay me for 15 minutes worth of work – I feel like a total heel. I’m a member of this Freelancers website called oDesk. Every once in a while I get a notification from oDesk, asking me to participate in an interview – which I usually accept (after all, we’re all looking for work).

I have to admit that most of the people that come to oDesk are usually seeking to outsource some work to somebody, in the hope that it will be for a cheap price. Now, I admit, my services aren’t cheap and that’s because I take high pride in what I do, and I aim to provide a service from A-to-Z. However, I never take a job without clearly looking at what I’m about to take upon myself – and most importantly, I’ll never ever charge for something that takes me up-to 15-20 minutes.

Tonight, I got an interview request from a man in Miami, asking me to look at his FreePBX installation. The man also stated that he required some development work to be done, so I replied positively to the interview request. Shortly after 10 minutes, I got an IM from the man and we started talking. I started looking at his Asterisk box and as I didn’t have any root access at the point, I commented that it may take anything from 2 hours to 4 hours to solve. In any case, we started talking about the payment, which was a little high for the guy, so we agreed on a price – pending that I take a quick look at the server at root level.

I got root access and logged on – after 2 minutes I replied to the man: “Dude, I can’t charge you for this, it will take me exactly 4 minutes to fix, and 2 more minutes to add the feature”. So, I did the change for the guy, who still wanted to pay me, which I replied: “donate the funds to your favorite charity, I can’t charge for this”. Now, everybody would say: “Are you fuck’n mad? taking 200$ for 6 minutes of work, that’s like a world record!”, well, it’s not a world record to me if I feel like a heel. Charging somebody for something has to mean something, I’ve seen people charge other people for nothing, and I believe things shouldn’t work like that. I truly believe in the existence of Karma, and that the world strives for balance. As I do on to others, others may also do on to me – so there is no use to charge somebody for 10 minutes of help, as I may need these 10 minutes of help some day from someone else.

As an Open Source consultant and evangelist, I’m sometimes amazed at the sheer GPL violations companies do, in the persuit of an exit. First of all, let us understand that general aspects of utilizing a GPL product:

1. You are FREE to download, use and modify any given source code.
2. In case you re-distribute your modified code, one of the following MUST apply:
   • You must re-distribute your code in source form to your customer, and/or
   • You must contribute your modifications to the main source code of the project, and/or
   • You must obtain a proper license/permission from the original author of the open-source code you are using.

These are more or less the basics, in lamen’s terms – without getting into the legal stuff that is usually some acustomed to these issues. So, in general, the basic limitations about using Open Source in a commercial products are mainly related to re-distribution. Modifications for personal-commercial usage (as long as no-distribution is performed) is permitted.

My work mainly involves the Asterisk Open Source PBX project. The world PBX market is a multi-billion dollar market, thus, for a company to infringe on the Asterisk GPL code may be a highly lucrative violation.

I’ve recently learned that 4 different comanies in Israel, all operating within the office PBX market, are violating the Asterisk GPL code. One company had embedded Asterisk as an auto-attendant and voicemail, while another had embedded it as a smart call-routing engine. Now, in general, if they would have used Asterisk as-is, that wouldn’t have been a problem. However, they had performed modifications to the Zaptel drivers, to work with their proprietary cards, they had modified the Asterisk code to work with various processors (mainly ARM) – and when asked for the modified code, their immediate claim would be: “Sorry, that is proprietary information”.

My main concern here is different, as companies will always be companies. All these modifications are performed by Open Source consultants and evangelists. Question be asked, why would an Open Source aware consultant enable this? the answer is simple, he needs to EAT! For the sake of making a living, sometimes (usually most of the times), a consultant will put aside his belives and idiology and will perform a violation knowingly. He would usually explain the violation to the customer, in such a way, that makes him feel good about himself and will pass the responsibility to the customer.

While the above may pass the responsibility to the customer, the consultant is as guilty (from my POV) as the customer. A consultant permitting the violation of GPL code can’t be considered a true Open Source conultant and Evangelist. Open Source is not only a way to earn some money, it is a way of life and a methodology of behavior – if one truely believes in it, one should stick to it all the time. If you know that a project you are about to take is a GPL violation, you should do the following:

1. Don’t accept the project, till the customer had given you a written proof that they are aware of the GPL violation, and their commitment to contact the original authors to obtain a proper license to the code.
2. Don’t accept the project, till the customer had given you a written proof that they are aware of the GPL violation, and their commitment to release the modified version of the code to the public or to the up-stream project.
3. Don’t accept the project, till the customer had given you a written proof that they will re-distibute the modified source code to their customer.

 If one of the above is not met, simply DON’T TAKE THE PROJECT!