“They say every ending contains a new beginning. In the world of
open source telephony, where revolutionary breakthroughs have been
slow to come, it took the final act of an outgoing proprietary
vendor to give the movement its much-needed jumpstart.”
“Rich Bodo, a co-founder of Open Source Telecom Corp., or OST,
recalls the 1998 conversation with fellow co-founder Martin Clinton
that led to the formation of the company.”
“I was working for VA Research at the time,” Bodo says,
referring to the former name of VA Linux Systems (LNUX). “Martin
was the president of Ingate and was getting ready to fold the
company up. He had an awful lot of code out there, and I suggested
that he open source it.”
“For Clinton, a man who ran the software company Ingate for
10 years, the decision about what to do with his company’s software
code was already “a conundrum” before Bodo’s suggestion. Although
his company’s primary software product, a PC-based voicemail and
messaging platform, enjoyed a sound reputation, it wasn’t exactly
the kind of technology you could offload at a going-out-of-business
sale.“