OSS

[Hal Snyder]

Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED> writes:

>> Perhaps I might kick off the issue of OSS on erlang-questions. How
>> does one convince the non-technical bean counters that using and
>> _providing_ OSS is of commercial benefit? And that opening source
>> code may generate goodwill (something that SCO Group is suffering a
>> severe lack thereof!) leading to sales.
>
> I would argue that S/W falls into several different categories
>
> 	1) Pre-competitive
> 	2) Competitive
> 	3) General odds and sods 

Right. I am very big on code sharing, but one reason that I can
participate in all this fun and open OTP work is that my employer -
who is relatively enlightened re open source - is able to license SIP
based software (C++ gateways, proxies, conferencing, and app engines).

In spite of the above I think SIP is only barely out of Joe's stage 1)
above. Another example of 3) would be an interoperability test suite
(basically a contract checker for SIP), which could be good for all
players because it facilitates adoption of SIP increasing the overall
market.

ObErlang: One reason OTP is such a good fit for our SIP platform is
that SIP alone is not enough. While it allows you to switch calls
around over an arbitrarily large network, I think you need more than
SIP for propagating call state. (There's an analogy with the stateless
vs. session issues in HTTP). That is where OTP is a big help
distributing call state while SIP interfaces to the outside and does
call setup and teardown.