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The current economy situation has raised the issue of expenses reduction for enterprises, both small and large. On the IT side this sometimes boils down to opting for open source solutions. While I can’t refute the business case behind this, it does seem that “open source” as a term is either being over-used or simply abused.

I am not one to fuss over semantics (I didn’t even mention Rich writing about it in relations to VoIP and Internet Telephony), but it just bugs me that open source is presented as the only “open standards” solution out there.

Just the other day one of our product managers sent out this news item to our mailing list, stating Cisco is “going open source”. At least that’s what the title said:

Cisco Opens Up to Open Source

But if you actually spend the time reading the piece, it depicts a different story:

Cisco officials now openly say support for standards used in open source communications software – such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – is a good business strategy for the company.

…

The implementation of SIP by Cisco actually began in 2005, when the company’s Linksys consumer/SMB communications hardware unit purchased Sipura, one of the most influential companies to develop the open standard SIP protocol for voice over IP.

Cisco has been a wide supporter of both H.323 and SIP in the standardization organization. I’ve met Cisco employees at the ITU for a lot longer than 2005, and they haven’t come from their Linsys or Sipura purchases.

The interesting fact in this post is that Cisco wishes to go after the SMB market with an IP PBX solution.

It is not open source. It’s open standards.

Open Standards vs. Open Source

Open source and open standards are different. Entirely. This is how I see things:

Open standards are standards that get specified by a “committee”, usually a standardization organization, and then can be purchased/obtained/seen/downloaded by anyone – sometimes for a low price, sometimes for free.

SIP and H.323, which are both used for IP communication, are open standards. Anyone can decide to implement them and then deploy his product, based on these, in this way or another. There are ecosystems built around these standards, increasing the choice of customers and eventually reducing the price of the end products.

Open source is simply source code you can download and use for free. It can follow an open standard, but this is not a must. It usually comes with some kind of a restriction attached to it, in the form of an open source license, which is in some cases negligible but in others can be hard to follow.

Business models around open source are varied, and the level of quality of different open source projects may differ drastically. Some of them are lousy while others are really good.

The Case of Open (and Non-Open) PBXs

Garrett Smith discussed recently the adoption of open source telephony by enterprises.

As far as I can say, open source PBXs have their place, though I wouldn’t place the distinction on the “openness” of the source, but rather on that of the standards.

The solutions coming from Cisco and others leading vendors are based on open standards in the “edge” of their networks: they can use a proprietary solution between enterprise phones, but when the time comes to “cross the line”, to connect your PBX to the outer world, their solutions will happily switch to PSTN, SIP, H.323 or any other open standard that is required.

This gives vendors more flexibility in adding features that are not available in the open standards, or are harder to implement (I’ve written here before about the problems of implementing standards). Some may say that they use it as a way to guarantee their dominance in the enterprise once they are deployed, with higher equipment costs than similar solutions based on open standards.

The distinction, in my view, is therefore between solutions that use open standards everywhere – within the PBX domain and outside of it – and those that utilize proprietary solutions within the PBX domain while “gateway-ing” out of it using an open standard.

In a similar fashion, you can think of Skype as a company that holds the members of its network behind the closed garden of a proprietary solution while “gateway-ing” it to PSTN and to SIP of late.