ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn posed this question in his post “Can open source take down Ribbit?”. Dana said:

So how tough would it be to build something like Ribbit, based on Appcelerator, and distribute that under the GPL? That would certainly get the frog into someone’s throat.

Dana says that Ribbit’s cool and I agree. The concept of a new telephone company is not really new. In fact, part of what Vonage and others like Vocalocity have been doing for awhile now are part of trying to re-invent the telephone company as we know it. We know it as cold, proprietary and stock full of cash. As of recent years, we also remember them as part of litigations such as with MCI, massive consolidation back into Ma Bell, and way behind the rest of the world in getting high-speed Internet access into our homes. I’m sure Judge Greene never imagined the break up would come back around to this.

Ribbit is adding their name to the attempt to re-invent the telephone company and dubbs their company “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” and has the following statement on their front page:

Ribbit is a new kind of Phone Company, born from the realization that legacy phone companies are not going to bring us the communication innovation we are all looking for.

That’s a bold statement and exciting at the same time. It also happens to be true, at least the part of the realization.

But was about Dana’s question about an open source alternative to Ribbit?

First, all of the components needed to build an open source Ribbit are already in place and in fact have been so for awhile. There’s also some not-fully-open-source-but-open-standards alternatives that could be used quite readily and that my previous company had been involved in developing for a number of years.

So, the ingredients:

First, add CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. Voxeo offers a great standards based server that has all 3 of these ingredients backed in as part of their Prophecy platform. You can even get a free, 2 port version of their software to download or build and run your apps in their network.

Second, add Appcelerator RIA + SOA services to enable communication to Voxeo over standard HTTP. In fact, we’ve SOA-enabled CCXML/VoiceXML in conjunction with one of our System Integration partners, Newfound Communications and deployed 2 large Voxeo-based telephony projects using next generation web as the front-end interface. One of the systems is doing over $2M per week in transactions. You can bring the power of web 2.0 to telephony 2.0 and create compelling applications.

Third, add Mashups to your applications like integration with Salesforce.com or a variety of other sources to create a compelling integration of enterprise data, your phone and your web content.

OK, so this isn’t so much an open source play. Or is it? These bits above represent a set of commercial applications using both open standards and open source technologies. If you could pull together the pieces of the ecosystem - you could create an interesting Ribbit-in-the-wild (open source) play.

Or, another possibility is using Appcelerator RIA+SOA and enabling this using Asterisk. Asterisk is SIP-based and could easily be used because of it’s large open source community to create an interesting Rabbit open source play. Appcelerator RIA could be used to build the front-end and SOA-enablement bits with Asterisk handling the telephony bits. Both Asterisk and Appcelerator are also GPL.

Anyone interested? Let me know.

Tech Tags: appcelerator asterisk voicexml ccxml sip voxeo ribbit

This morning we’re announcing that Marc Fleury has officially joined the advisory board of Appcelerator. If you don’t know, Marc Fleury was the founder and CEO of JBoss, which was acquired last year by Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) for $350M.

Marc and I met around seven years ago through Ben Sabrin. Ben had just joined JBoss as the first non-founder employee and I had been using JBoss and Ben and I did business at his previous company when I was CTO at eHatchery.

My first run in with Marc was a classic marcf email from him, just after Ben had joined, threatening me because I had
setup a sourceforge project called VBoss. He was concerned that I was encroaching on his trademark and was glad to let me know I couldn’t do that. I told Ben that he could tell Marc to “pound sand” and that the project in fact was complementary to JBoss and I intended to add some voicexml capabilities to JBoss. I also told him that I really didn’t care what he thought. So much for first impressions.

Not long after that I worked on a set of remote networking capabilities in our core product (at the time, we bundled JBoss at Vocalocity) which we needed for machine-to-machine communications. This later officially became JBoss remoting and part of AOP remoting, EJB remoting and JMS remoting capabilities in JBoss. Marc invited me to become one of the early core developers of JBoss although I was not an employee. I got to know a lot of really brilliant people at JBoss in the core group and became friends with a number of them. Marc was also generous and I received early JBoss stock as part of my contributions.

Marc has become increasingly involved and excited about what we’re doing at Appcelerator. It’s been good seeing him in the office each week and it’s been a pleasure working with him on a number of strategic activities we’re engaged in. Marc has a real knack to take something extremely complicated and boiling it down to a simple set of messages. I’m also excited because Marc seems to be back to his old self and seems to be enjoying life a lot more lately. I’d like to think that Appcelerator and the team are a part of his new found joy. Marc generally seems excited about working with us and helping out and I must say - he’s back in his groove.

When I heard the comment from Marc the other day: “dude, i invented the friggin open source. ever heard of it?” I knew he was back. (if you have never read Fake Steve Jobs, this was a play on FSJ’s ipod slogan).

Our team is very fortunate to have Marc advising Appcelerator and I am very pleased that he’s been willing to spend part of his semi-retirement time to help us build our vision.

marcf, welcome aboard and remember, we love you.

Tech Tags: appcelerator jboss redhat marcf marcfleury atlanta

Today we announced the appointment of Ben Sabrin to Vice President of Stategy and Business Development for Appcelerator. Ben’s an open source veteran, with the distinction of being the first non-founder employee at JBoss, which was acquired for $350M by RedHat (NYSE:RHAT) over a year ago. Ben took some time off in a semi-sabbatical over the past year since the acquisition and has now decided it was time to get back to work and help us build out Appcelerator.

I’ve known Ben for quite awhile. Ben and I became friend’s long before JBoss when he was at Pencom Systems. Ben helped place quite a few developers for me when I was the CTO of eHatchery. During that time, he was also one of the main guys behind the Atlanta Java Users Groups (AJUG). This is where Ben met Marc and the rest became the history of JBoss. At JBoss, Ben was very instrumental in bringing on a lot of the key core contributors such as Bela Ban, Bill Burke and Gavin King - among many others. Ben also had probably the biggest impact on growing JBoss’ revenue and helping Marc created a profitable, professional open source business model.

I’m excited to have Ben join Nolan and I and the rest of the team at Appcelerator. He’ll be a tremendous asset to the team. Welcome aboard.

Tech Tags: appcelerator opensource jboss redhat rhat ajug atlanta