Why OnSIP is Built with Open Source Software

A brief post over at OSTATIC about why web services companies rely so heavily on open source software makes a great point on the level of control that open source software brings to a company over an otherwise equivalent proprietary solution.

From the article...

Let's start with the obvious. Facebook is a software company. So is Twitter. So are many of the other companies that are participating in open source infrastructure development. They're not in the business of selling software, but the companies couldn't outsource their development and still retain the control and speed they need to do business in a space that requires constant evolution. Developing software is one of their core competencies.

This may be surprising to some, but Junction Networks is much more a software company than a telephone company. This is not necessarily obvious because, instead of selling software, we are providing an internet based phone service. However, our phone service is built upon a strong foundation of open source software. This is because we believe it is our responsibility to develop and maintain a system that provides highly reliable phone service to our customers. By using open source software at the core of our services, we can immediately fix problems within our services without relying on a third party software vendor to deliver the required solutions. We also garner the flexibility to add any features our customers need. This model allows Junction Networks to make agile development choices in a competitive and fast moving market place. Essentially, because our phone service is what customers are paying us for, we hold ourselves responsible for its development, end to end, to ensure a higher level of service.

Using open source software turns out to be a cost efficient and continuously improving model for our company. First, we are able to leverage the hard work and knowledge from the community of developers in the various pieces of software we employ. Second, we get full access to the source code, allowing us to customize every piece of our infrastructure as necessary. The benefit for the open source community is that we then give our work back to the open source projects, enabling the community to continue building better pieces of software. Moreover, in repeating this process, we become experts in the code we are deploying; when patches and feature are needed, we have the knowledge to implement them.

The overarching point is that because our phone services are at the core of our business, we believe these are the services that we must develop in house. For very similar reasons that we can't run our service "in the cloud", we also can't rely on proprietary, closed source solutions for the software that delivers our service. In the end, we are responsible for keeping things running; and, to effectively do this, we use the tools that provide us the most control.