Jordy Blog

Custom Communication Apps

My brother and business partner Gabe will be helping to lead a discussion on FreeSWITCH and Asterisk at the the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow.

Gabe is the CTO of our small startup company (Izeni), and our team has built, and continues to build, some pretty cool projects based on these (and other) open source telephony technologies.

Some of the recent FreeSWITCH customization projects we’ve built for our clients include a custom call center that can handle up to 100 concurrent agents on commodity hardware, and a distributed SIP load tester that’s capable of pushing thousands of concurrent SIP calls (suitable for stress testing extremely large telephony infrastructures).

But those are just 2 examples of the many ways a company can customize a free software phone switch to enhance their current products or services with open source telephony. Whether you need a hosted IVR (Interactive Voice Response) solution, or just some method to bridge phone calls, record calls, make outbound calls, etc; FreeSWITCH and Asterisk are up to the task.

Anyway, if you’re in Utah and are interested in learning more about Open Source telephony, you should come by tomorrow to check out the discussion. You can also can review the (expansive) FreeSWITCH and Asterisk feature sets. And if you need some phone-related development done for your company, that kind of work is highly specialized, easy to outsource, and right up our alley. We’d love to help!

Along those same lines is something that’s been on my mind lately: I’d be interested in starting a Utah FreeSWITCH Users Group, originally meeting in only in Utah Valley, but hopefully spreading as the FreeSWITCH project comes into more common usage. If you’re local and would be interesting in participating (or leading), please let me know.

And if you think of some way you’d like to have your product interact with phones, text messages, even IM –that’s just what we do. We’d love to help you work through it –even if it’s just to help you see what’s possible.

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Walled Gardens and Open Source

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Released

The new Ubuntu is out. Download it here if you haven’t already.

For my non-technical readers:

Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux, an operating system that can replace Windows. Linux is open sourced, meaning you can look at the code and see how it works. It’s also free to download and includes a ton of world-class open-source software: Firefox for web browsing, OpenOffice for office software, Gimp for photo editing, and much more.

Ubuntu is easy to use, and it’s a great way to familiarize yourself with Linux. Plus it can save you a lot of money if you’re buying a PC that doesn’t come with Windows. (Or, if you’re currently pirating Windows –you know who you are– switching to Linux can help you get legal.)

There is a ton of help online. There are also lots of local user groups like Ubuntu Utah that can help you get it installed and answer any questions you have along the way.

Anyway, give Linux a try; you’ll probably like it. I for one, am never going back to Windows.

Rockbox Rocks

Over the weekend I installed Rockbox on my iPod, and let me just say that I love my iPod again.

I love that I can rate podcasts. I love that I can delete a song right from my iPod. I love that I can play Ogg Vorbis files. I love that I can make dynamic playlists on the fly based on song metadata.

Rockbox is not only functional, it's themeable! :)

There are numberous other features as well. Because it’s an open-source platform, the possibilities really are limitless. You can even play Doom on it, although I don’t know who would really want that.  :)  Also, it dual boots into the Apple Firmware, so I could easily switch back if I ran into problems.

Lastly, Rockbox was surprisingly super easy to install: there’s a simple wizard that walks you through it. You don’t even need to backup your music. (I still did though, only because I didn’t know it wasn’t necessary.)

Next step: Giving my songs sane filenames instead of Apple’s hidden nosensical hex-based names.

Finally my iPod is being beaten into submission. :)

UTOSC 2008 and Utah Business Search Trends

My brother Gabe wrote an interesting post highlighting how Google Trends searches show that Utah is a hotbed of Open Source. It reminded me that I haven’t plugged the Utah Open Source Conference that’s happening this week. This conference is something you don’t want to miss.  I think you can still get tickets.

If your business is still not leveraging open source, you need to stop by to meet some of the people that can help you make it happen.

Now, on a separate nerdy note, I wanted to echo Gabe’s post by pointing out some business terms in which Utahans have peculiar interest according to search data in Google Trends.  When it comes to industry related searches, we rank #1 for Multi Level Marketing, #2 in Outdoor Recreation, and #3 in Telemarketing.

Utah also does a disproportionate amount of searches for online business terms: we rank #1 for SEO, #2 for Internet Marketing, #1 for Web Analytics, and #2 for Internet Business.

Can you think of any other obvious top Utah searches?  I’m looking specifically for business terms; although searches for jello, meth, and vouchers are interesting in their own right.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress in Utah

My friend Mike Smullin (who BTW is an excellent developer of custom WordPress plugins) sent me this:

Hi Jordy,

Not sure how much you like WordPress or Matt Mullenweg, but I figured I’d let you know about this upcoming event in Utah:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/416950/?ps=5

Enjoy! :)

This sounds like it’s going to be a fun event.  I hope to see you there.

Utah Open Source Conference Starts Tomorrow (Thursday)

My friend Clint Savage (aka Herlo) has lead a team of volunteers in planning the first ever Utah Open Source Conference, which has come together quite nicely (especially for the first year).

News and updates on the conference have been plastered all over Gabe‘s excellent Utah Open Source Planet, but I thought I’d post a reminder here for my readers and the local business folk who catch me on ConnectBlogs since the conference boasts a rather appealing business track.

If you’re in business in Utah and would like to see how open source can save you thousands of dollars annually in IT expenses, you should check the Utah Open Source Conference out. You’ll be able to learn some open source basics, see what other Utah company’s are doing to harness open source, and (perhaps most importantly) network with some of the brightest technologists in the state –people who may be able to help you make your business run more smoothly for a fraction of the cost.

Here’s the registration page, which will remain open until the event sells out –but act fast since there aren’t a ton of spaces left. I should mention that there’s a steep discount if you’re a member of one of Utah’s fantastic open source user groups.

Event keynotes include legendary open source technocrat Bruce Perens, and the Open Source Initiative‘s articulate Matt Asay. There will be numerous excellent local speakers as well.

SCO Stock Dives

SCOX is down almost 72% so far today –a result of failed litigation. (It turns out they never owned the copyright to Unix after all. Who would have thought?)

Anyway, that’ll teach ‘em. SCO might not be around a year from now, but Linux will.

Viva open source!

SINU – SCO is Not Unix

You gotta love this:

Lindon software company SCO Group was dealt a heavy blow Friday when a judge ruled it doesn’t own the rights to the Unix code it has accused IBM of putting into the open-source Linux computer operating system.

In a 102-page ruling, U.S. District Court Dale Kimball tossed out SCO’s claim that it owns the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. At issue: whether SCO purchased all rights to Unix from Novell in 1995, or whether Novell retained ownership while granting limited licensing and development rights.

“If the parties intended to transfer Unix and UnixWare copyrights as well, they could have easily demonstrated that intent while they were making the distinction for Unix and UnixWare trademarks,” Kimball wrote in Friday’s ruling. “There is nothing in the text of the [Asset Purchase Agreement] that would support an interpretation of ‘all copyrights’ to mean only Netware copyrights.”

Kimball’s ruling stands to torpedo SCO’s slander of title lawsuit against Novell and could also fatally undermine its bigger, $5 billion claim against Big Blue.

Joe LaSala, senior vice president and general counsel of the Waltham, Mass.-based software maker, said in a statement Friday that the ruling “vindicates the position Novell has taken since the inception of the dispute with SCO” and “eliminates SCO’s threat to the Linux community, based on allegations of copyright infringement of Unix.

Darl McBride, chief executive officer of SCO, did not return a telephone call seeking comment Friday.

SCO has spent tens of millions of dollars in court since first filing against IBM in March 2003. The software company accused IBM of damaging the value of its version of the Unix operating system by removing source code from two of its Unix products and illegally dumping the code into the freely distributed Linux system, which resembles Unix. IBM denies the claims and has filed a countersuit.

Earlier this year, U.S. Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells rejected SCO’s argument that IBM programmers had destroyed potentially damaging code evidence soon after SCO filed suit.

In an 2006 ruling, Wells barred SCO from pursuing most of nearly 300 claims against IBM, ruling that the Utah company had failed to provide specific evidence of Unix code it claimed IBM had misappropriated into Linux. Even so, at the time, McBride vowed to see SCO’s complaint to trial.

SCO has blamed competition from Linux for the protracted slide in its revenues and operating losses. In June, the company said it had an operating loss of $1.1 million in the quarter ended April 30. A year earlier it lost $3.9 million.

Revenue slipped to $6 million from $7.1 million.

SCO is also pursuing a parallel lawsuit against auto parts retailer AutoZone for infringing on its Unix copyrights. It accuses AutoZone of running versions of Linux that contain SCO code.

Basically, SCO vs Everybody has no merit.  Of course we all knew that all along, but it’s good to hear it from the judge.  :)

Software for Starving Students 2007.01 — RELEASED

Here’s the press release we sent out:

The 2007.01 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

More info:

• Project homepage
• A complete list of included titles
• Screenshots

Please help us out by seeding the torrent, spreading the word, and burning copies for your friends and family. (Nothing spreads holiday cheer like good, free software.)

Happy Downloading!

Last year this got hundreds of thousands of downloads after getting posted on the front page of Digg. Here’s this year’s entry.