OStatic

By Aaron Huslage

The world of open source VoIP platforms has been dominated by the Asterisk PBX and the products that surround it. While no one has perfect market share numbers for this beast, it has more than likely over 95 percent of the open source share and some significant portion of IP PBXs installed around the world. As Om Malik wrote in late 2007, Asterisk has been downloaded over 1 million times.

Now, another player could give Asterisk a run for its money. Announced at the Emerging Telephony conference in 2006, Freeswitch is quietly growing in popularity and stability.

By Allan Leinwand, a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.

I was having lunch with Kelly Herrell, the CEO of Vyatta (one of our portfolio companies) and he gave me a great quote on why the momentum of open source software is impossible to fight. Kelly said, ﾓCompetitors can try to lock the front door of an enterprise and effectively stop traditional software vendors from entering the building, but it is impossible to stop free bits from coming in over the network.ﾔ

By Alistair Croll

Guest Post By Kord Campbell

I'm a software evangelist for an IT search engine startup in San Francisco, doing a guest post here on OStatic. We just released a new version of our software which provides REST-based APIs for developers to extend and enhance the basic functionality of their products, beyond what we originally designed. Much like Sleepycat did with Berkeley DB, or Flickr does with their APIs, we encourage an open system for accessing the data that the proprietary product stores.

Written by Allan Leinwand, a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.

The use of open-source software and commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware is making a profound impression on the telecom market -- one that seems destined to follow the path blazed by web economics. To date, the telecom industry has not yet fully embraced open-source and COTS hardware, something that I believe is a fait accompli -- regardless of any course of action taken by traditional vendors.

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOm.com

A few months ago, Anne Zelenka wrote about how WordPress could be an underpinning of a social network, an idea first postulated by Chris Messina. Of course, when Automattic, the startup behind WordPress.comﾒs hosted service, raised a whopping $29.5 million in VC funding recently, I speculated that they might be adding social networking features to their service. Now it is almost certain. (Continue reading at Gigaom.com.)

Like many a web worker, my browser of choice is Firefox. I favor it because it's less of a target for hackers than Internet Explorer, has good security features, and I make use of lots of useful extensions for it. However, I run both Firefox and Internet Explorer and frequently jump into Internet Explorer when I run into problems in Firefox, or when downloading new applications (this just seems to work more smoothly in Internet Explorer). If you, as I do, use Internet Explorer, definitely look into IE7Pro-a free download add-on that adds lots of useful features to the browser.

Bowing to what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the changing landscape of the IT industry and others call pressure from EU anti-trust actions, Microsoft announced today the release of some of its technical crown jewels: the heretofore secret APIs Microsoft products used to talk with each other.

Microsoft is changing the way it does business and is opening up, according to a long elaborate press release the company issued this morning. I am reading through it and will try and make sense of it all.

Original Post authored by Jason Harris on 2/19/2008 on GigaOm

Nokiaﾒs E series and N Series phones are attractive options for mobile phone consumers. Nokia openly goes after other handset makers and telcos for crippling features and stripping out functionality such as fully enabled Bluetooth, Wi-Fi access and so on. Nokia and their use of the Symbian operating system create a fertile ground for mobile application developers.