Sangoma and Open Source’s Double Edge Sword

A Game of Open Source Cat and Mouse

As open source telephony continues to make its ascension as a legitimate threat to legacy systems vendors an interesting game of cat and mouse is developing between the various PSTN connectivity vendors.

Not a press release goes by without an eventual answer from a competing company and I doubt that the latest announcement from Sangoma that they will be powering FreeSWITCH, an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch, will go unanswered by their competitors. Now most consider hardware to be a bit of a yawn (and I tend to agree), however this announcement marks another notch in the belt for Sangoma. Sangoma, who just a few short years ago was a distant number two in the open source PCI card space to Digium, now finds themselves a gobbling up market share thanks in large part to partnerships with the various open source telephony platforms – all of which was created, thanks in large part to Digium.

A Changing of the Guard?

For years Digium had been the defacto choice for PSTN connectivity among the Asterisk community. As the community has grown, so to has the commercial ambitions of the community resulting in a handful of forks – or projects based on Asterisk (such as trixbox, CallWeaver, FreePBX, etc) being created that directly compete with Asterisk. This trend, along with the commercial ambitions of Digium, produced an environment in which the customer (and community) are now in direct competition with the vendor, Digium. While there is nothing wrong on either front (this is the business world), it creates a painful situation for Digium.

As a supplier of PSTN connectivity cards, they are, unfortunately, relegated to the role of “competitor” due to their creation, maintenance and monetization of Asterisk. In doing what any business would do (protecting their business interests) they have in many cases excluded themselves from potential partnership with these new open source telephony platforms, thus opening the door for their competitors, like Sangoma, to gain market share. While Digium may own the lion share of the PSTN connectivity for Asterisk, one has to wonder at what cost (especially as other platforms grow in popularity…which has been happening) to their overall PCI card business.

This is certainly a pickle for the folks at Digium, isn’t it?

Open Source Double Edge Sword

There is a moral to this story; don’t become your customers competitor.

But isn’t this inevitable with open source projects (not just Asterisk)?

As open source platforms grow, the people behind them will look monetize in order to continue to support the project, but so too will a great majority of the community, inherently causing conflicts. This isn’t Digium fault – it was inevitable and I suspect you will see other open source projects (even ones outside of the industry) subject to the same sort of events. Both the beauty and the curse of open source is the idea of free; but free is a double edge sword if I have ever seen one.

While Digium has fell victim to the double edge sword, their competitors have prospered. In creating a great business, they also created a great business for their competitors. The more you think about it, the more you realize why large, established companies avoid the idea of open source with their products. Sure it is great in the beginning, but in the end, you create conflicts and competition – and who wants that?

No one.

These cat and mouse games in the open source telephony space will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future. In the end, the winner will be the one who best uses the sword – without getting cut in the process.