Digium announced yesterday that due to trademark issues, they will be renaming “Zaptel” to “DAHDI”, which stands for “Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface”.

Zaptel is an OSS hardware driver API developed by Jim Dixon. Zaptel drivers were initially developed for BSD and Tormenta T1 interface cards. Digium began producing TDM interface cards based upon Jim’s work and made significant improvements to Zaptel on the Linux platform.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Jim Dixon, here is his bio from the 2005 Astricon conference:

Jim is the inventor of the Zapata telephony cards and a Systems Engineer (consultant) with the main specialites in Telecom. He’s been doing Engineering ever since Junior High school (although professionally since High school) and have been an Internet developer since 1980 (working on the Arpanet for MIT). He never bothered with college.

In addition Jim have been helping with the development of Asterisk during its lifetime. He has also created and been working on the app_rpt Asterisk 2 way radio project.

Jim’s Zapata Telephony Project took its name from the historic Mexican revolutionary figure Emiliano Zapata, an homage to symbolize the revolutionary nature of the Zaptel project. The term “Zaptel” is in fact trademarked by this calling card company, prompting Digium to adopt a new name to avoid legal issues surrounding the use of the Zaptel name.

Over the last two weeks, rumors have swirled around the industry as to the fate of the once promising voice start-up Jangl, who looked to be in shambles after running out of cash and seeing the departure of their co-founders and engineering team to JAJAH. For those of you not familiar with Jangl, they are a voice 2.0 company with a variety of web-based calling solutions, most notably their “blind” calling service that allows online dating participants to make calls between one another without revealing their true phone number.

This weekend, it was announced that Jangl had been acquired by LiveUniverse, a video, social networking and music media company headed by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan. LiveUniverse, which touts over 55m visitors a month across all of their properties, already has the following and the brand advertisers that Jangl desperately needs in order to be a profitable stand-alone business.

Fortunately for those left at Jangl and LiveUniverse, it does not appear that Jangl will necessarily be a standalone play. Although it certainly has the potential to be a stand-alone business, Jangl has had most of it’s success as a “white label” provider of voice functionality for online dating sites and social networks. The most logical next step for the LiveUniverse is to integrate Jangl’s technology across their web properties making this acquisition more about purchasing a piece of technology, rather than a business.

Next to integrating the technology across their properties, LiveUniverse would be smart to continue to try and attract more social networks and online dating sites as white label customers of their voice capabilities. The downfall of this, however, is that voice is still not a demand feature for the users of said sites. So is the marriage of LiveUniverse and Jangl a perfect fit? I think so, although I believe that it is a perfect fit because the Jangl technology compliments LiveUniverse’s current offerings and enhances the features that the company can offer to their web “guests.” I doubt, though, that the acquisition will do much for the company by way of direct revenues.

VentureVoIP has an interesting story commenting on a recent post on the Trixbox Forum.

As you may know, Trixbox began as Asterisk@Home, and was rebranded Trixbox. Asterisk@Home made use of a configuration tool called AMP (Asterisk Management Portal), currently known as FreePBX, created by Philippe Lindheimer.

Well, Trixbox is distancing themselves from FreePBX, and has moved to create their own GPL forked configuration tool, which is more tightly integrated with Trixbox. Trixbox also cited security concerns, faster bug fixes and improved features as additional reasons for the change. Trixbox has released CE v2.6.2 (build 2.6.0.18), which includes the GPL patch for their integrated version of (formerly) FreePBX, and is currently BETA.

This announcement led to some verbal jousting on the official announcement thread within the Trixbox forums.

Not hard to read between the lines of this one. The team at FreePBX has had growing commercial aspirations of their own over the past year and has made some strategic moves in order to monetize their software tools.

Here are some snippets from the original Trixbox announcement:

…And with the recent decrease of training revenue, it is getting even harder.

Read: FreePBX launched their own Training Seminars which put them in somewhat of a competitive position versus Trixbox’ own FtOCC trainings.

trixbox CE has grown significantly since then, as has FreePBX, once under the reign of Coalescent Systems, then under Rob Thomas and now the trio of James Scanlin (who is the business guy), another partner (who is mainly silent), and the hard-working (yet only single developer!) Philippe Lindheimer.

Read: Trixbox is unhappy with FreePBX’ timeliness of response to bug fixes in conjunction with Trixbox CE. By integrating the FreePBX configuration tool, they are no longer beholden to the FreePBX development team.

And, when we do dutifully report the bugs (in exhausting detail) back to FreePBX we oft get back a request for large tracts of money to fix the bug. Look: we would love to pay large sums of money to FreePBX.

Read: We (Trixbox/Fonality) realize you guys are ambitious…why would we fund you in order to take a run at us?

Perhaps FreePBX is emerging as a potential rival to Trixbox. These impressions are my own, and I don’t claim them to be hard facts. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and to see the reaction from both supporters and detractors within the OSS telephony community.