It's an interesting argument - however, the only "service" you identify is 911. I look at my phone bill every month and notice that a lot of money has been collected to support 911. I go and meet with the people that run the 911 centers and they don't have a lot of money. Seems someone in the middle ate it all. Anyways, perhaps what is needed is to IP enable all the 911 centers - then there will be no argument that the VoIP vendors are taking advantage of the the PSTN providers.
S/MIME and PGP for email encryption have been around but have not really taken off. What can be done to make a scheme that will allow everyone to use signed and encrypted email. I'll assume this means no extra effort or cost for the end users but I would be interested in hearing what you thing the requirements are for secure email to be widely deployed and possible solutions.
There is open source code for tons of the traditionally G.7xx CODECs around. The issues many of them require licensing various peoples patents. A casual look at speex would make me think that it is quite likely to infringe someone's CELP patents. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It's really cool to see something like speex happening but there are a few other things that you might want to think about.
Global IP Sound put out a codec for voice called iLBC. It is specifically designed to avoid infringing known patents. It's sound quality vs. packet loss is very good for IP systems. This is being standardized by the IETF. All the source code is open source and in the draft which you can find at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-avt -ilbc-codec-00.txt.
Sun has a free implementation of CCITT compression types G.711, G.721 and G.723 at ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/audio/ccitt-adpcm.tar.gz. This is just a free implementation - it does not give you a license to the patents.
Various people including Cisco have been working with the license holders of G.729 IPR to make it available for "pre-commercial" systems, developers, and education. http://www.vovida.org/applications/downloads/G729A/
I had some offline conversations with Joe Hildebrand, Tony, and Peter and they have put together some strong statements about IPR that show my previous worries about IPR and jabber are not an issue. Attached below are some very clear statements of their position.I am very happy they are taking this position on patents.
Cullen Jennings
Hi. I am the Vice President of Open Standards & Alliances for Jabber, Inc.. In response to your message below and on behalf of the company, I will state that Jabber, Inc. neither has, nor claims any patent rights with respect to the XMPP protocol. Further, Jabber Inc. has no intent to claim any intellectual property rights with respect to the protocol that would limit in any way its free and open use. I hope this addresses your concerns. If you have any additional questions or issues, please feel free to contact me directly.
Sincerely,
Tony
Tony Bamonti
As Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF), I can state categorically that the JSF does not now hold any patents, that it has not applied for any patents, and that it never will apply for any patents. The JSF is a standards organization founded to manage the Jabber protocol. As soon as our new Board is installed (our annual meeting is being held one hour from now), we will finalize our IPR policy and include a statement about the fact that the JSF does not assert any IPR.
The AGP interface is much faster than the memory interface on most recent intel based machines. I do computer vision where a bunch of scratch pad memory is required - the memory on the graphics card is fast and can interlace with acces to main memory. Rumour has it many games take advantage of this. In Linux you can do it with X stuff and in Windows you can use DirectX to do it.
If you are doing SIP for VoIP, hopefully you are using the open source stuff on vovida.org which has over 100 man years of development in it by engineers who were paid mostly by Cisco. I work for Cisco but I think they have been very good to the open source SIP community.
I'm not worried that they own the trademark that is fine. I did not say they own IPR on the protocol - I said they owned IPR on things that you will need to implement a server. If someone can point me to a document to the contrary I will stand corrected - I have asked people at Jabber this and I certainly did get the "there is no IPR answer". However, I encourage you to look carefully at this.
I was at the Jabber BOF and it was quite interesting.
One thing is that jabber was presented as a solution not for instant messaging (IM) or presence protocol (PP) but as a solution for asynchronous transfer of XML. Another BOF, XML Conf, was suggesting there was a requirement for this sort of stuff to provision routers and such.
Most people seemed to feel that Jabber had major issues from a security and privacy point of view for doing IMPP. Remember that the IETF did look at jabber a few years ago for doing IMPP and it was rejected. Since then, many protocols have been proposed. IM can send message in "page mode" where you are just sending a one time message or it can set up a whole session between the clients for cases where you are going to transfer many message back and forth. This second mode is called session mode. Right now the SIMPLE group more or less has a good proposal for page mode and setting up sessions but is debating how to transfer messages in session mode.
I believe that the following companies have said they will support SIMPLE: Microsoft, Yahoo, Lotus, etc. Unlike what the CNET article said, I was told that AOL filed documents with the FCC saying they would do SIMPLE.
If there is a IETF WG on jabber, which I believe might happen, the interesting thing will be to read what that groups chatter is to do - I bet it won't say that it is gong to developed a complete IMPP solution.
On a side note about how this effects open source development, I work with the vovida.org project which develops voice over IP and messaging open source software. We have talked to the jabber.org and jabber.com multiple times. It's always been difficult to figure out how this all fits together from an open source point of view. You see, jabber.com has patents on stuff you need to implement jabber. At the Jabber BOF at IETF I specifically asked them if they would make this IPR available in a way that worked for open source people. They answered that people had implements this stuff and they weren't suing them. This is like yah, DUH, of course when we are trying to get people addicted to the drug we don't sue them. They have NEVER made any commitment to allow this IPR to be used in open source products. They are a desperate company looking for a way to make a business model out of jabber. If you think jabber is the best for open source - give that some careful thought.
I am a IEEE member and I think this is bogus so not all those members are supportive of it.
To quote from the IEEE website, "The IEEE (Eye-triple-E) is a non-profit, technical professional association of more than 377,000 individual members in 150 countries". I don't think that the IEEE should even enter in this topic.
Personally, I believe this does not really represent the wishes of IEEE members but instead represents the views of a small group that runs the IEEE. As far as I can tell these are mostly older males who used to work for the US defense industry and upset their skills are no longer needed by many companies.
If you want to implement a VoIP system, there is a bunch of open
source software at www.vovida.org that was
put there to help make things like this happen.
<blatant
ad> There is SIP proxies and registrars, B2BUA for prepaid billing, MGCP
to SIP translators, H.323 to SIP translators, voice mail system, SIP, RTSP, OSP,
COPS, TRIP, RTP, RADIUS and MGCP stacks, and much more. It has been tested with
phones and gateways from almost all major vendors and most of the smaller SIP
vendors. It can be set up in with no single point of failure and has been tested
up too 500 calls per seconds (that's a lot per day - you do the
math) </blatant ad>
There is also some good infromation at
www.iptel.org
The IEEE does not pay authors - it is all academics and professionals. They do not pay editors or review boards - again all volunteer. They charge very high fees to libraries and even individuals. The online subscriptions cost almost as much as the print subscriptions.
In short they do very little for the huge amount paid to them. Why can the academic community not form a purely web based journal that is of the same academic peer review quality of the IEEE and available to all for free? Seems like this might be a good time to figure out the answer to that questions.
If Bin Laden had a nuke, I would really hope that the launch control systems was controlled by a really good OS that had been critically reviewed and worked on by lots of people - not some home grown thing cooked up in a cave.
RTEMS (see http://www.rtems.army.mil) is a very nice real time OS that the military has open sourced with a very BSD like license that even mentions GPL (see http://www.rtems.army.mil/rg4/copyright.html)
As a side note I see that RTEMS stands for something new - perhaps I am having a 1984 experience but I seem to remember it used to stand for "Real Time Executive for Missile Systems"
Don't say the us military has not done anything for open source or I will be forced to mention Arpanet:-)
Nearly every linux runs in a VM of sorts. The bios initialized your super weird ram bus meemory and other exotic hardware to look more or less like a real fast 486. Claming linux was not designed to run in a VM shows a prety fundemental lack of apreciation of modern computer archatectures.
This is complete bogus - the CIELAB space was one of the few spaces that was designed to be as close to perceptually uniform as possible. It may not be perfece but is is quite good - I think you are confusing IED Lab* space with something else.
Hogwash to the lot of them.... The ideas they call packet switching were clearly being used by the Romans, the only difference was the transport involved people and horses not electrical signals but the transport if totally irrelevant to all the concepts they claim are packet switching. Odds are good it was used well before the Romans.
Clearly 1c/page is way to expensive for much content (anyone reading this fine message for example:-) and may be too low for other some other stuff. But price is price, the market could find the right price. Imagine it was 0.01 cents per site visit - that might work as a price point for most people for most things.
The issue is that it won't work from a technical point of view. No one has proposed a practical billing systems where the cost of dealing with each transaction is in the penny category. Never mind the privacy and access rules - you can bet this billing system is going to require you to enter a credit card number.
So I offer a challenge - some one come up with a reasonable secure system, that allow micro (sub 10 cent) billing, is anonymous like cash, is deployable, is available to people other than Americans over the age of 18, and costs at most 0.1 cent per billed transaction. Seriously, got an idea on how to solve this, I imagine my employer (Cisco) would seriously help make it happen. Send me some email.
PS. I would also like to use this system to charge you 5 cents to send me an email - Can you imagine how that would cut down on spam?
Many companies, including Cisco where I work, have made strong use of open source software and deployed it extensively - this is different from developing it. Make sure you deal with them separately.
All the problems that exists in traditional software development, also exists in open source plus some new ones because of communication and distributed control issues. It's not like you can easily fire an open source developer (and that is good:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting argument - however, the only "service" you identify is 911. I look at my phone bill every month and notice that a lot of money has been collected to support 911. I go and meet with the people that run the 911 centers and they don't have a lot of money. Seems someone in the middle ate it all. Anyways, perhaps what is needed is to IP enable all the 911 centers - then there will be no argument that the VoIP vendors are taking advantage of the the PSTN providers.
Clearly RFC 1149 would be the best for this.
S/MIME and PGP for email encryption have been around but have not really taken off. What can be done to make a scheme that will allow everyone to use signed and encrypted email. I'll assume this means no extra effort or cost for the end users but I would be interested in hearing what you thing the requirements are for secure email to be widely deployed and possible solutions.
Thanks, Cullen
I see the IETF now has three WG doing IM standards
XMPP (The jabber stuff)
IMPP Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol
SIMPLE SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions
I notice most the people I know you AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.
There is open source code for tons of the traditionally G.7xx CODECs around. The issues many of them require licensing various peoples patents. A casual look at speex would make me think that it is quite likely to infringe someone's CELP patents. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It's really cool to see something like speex happening but there are a few other things that you might want to think about.
t -ilbc-codec-00.txt.
A /
Global IP Sound put out a codec for voice called iLBC. It is specifically designed to avoid infringing known patents. It's sound quality vs. packet loss is very good for IP systems. This is being standardized by the IETF. All the source code is open source and in the draft which you can find at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-av
Sun has a free implementation of CCITT compression types G.711, G.721 and G.723 at ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/audio/ccitt-adpcm.tar.gz. This is just a free implementation - it does not give you a license to the patents.
Various people including Cisco have been working with the license holders of G.729 IPR to make it available for "pre-commercial" systems, developers, and education. http://www.vovida.org/applications/downloads/G729
I had some offline conversations with Joe Hildebrand, Tony, and Peter and they have put together some strong statements about IPR that show my previous worries about IPR and jabber are not an issue. Attached below are some very clear statements of their position.I am very happy they are taking this position on patents.
Cullen Jennings
Hi. I am the Vice President of Open Standards & Alliances for Jabber, Inc..
In response to your message below and on behalf of the company, I will state
that Jabber, Inc. neither has, nor claims any patent rights with respect to
the XMPP protocol. Further, Jabber Inc. has no intent to claim any
intellectual property rights with respect to the protocol that would limit
in any way its free and open use. I hope this addresses your concerns. If
you have any additional questions or issues, please feel free to contact me
directly.
Sincerely,
Tony
Tony Bamonti
As Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF), I can state
categorically that the JSF does not now hold any patents, that it has not
applied for any patents, and that it never will apply for any patents. The
JSF is a standards organization founded to manage the Jabber protocol. As
soon as our new Board is installed (our annual meeting is being held one
hour from now), we will finalize our IPR policy and include a statement
about the fact that the JSF does not assert any IPR.
Peter
--
Peter Saint-Andre
The AGP interface is much faster than the memory interface on most recent intel based machines. I do computer vision where a bunch of scratch pad memory is required - the memory on the graphics card is fast and can interlace with acces to main memory. Rumour has it many games take advantage of this. In Linux you can do it with X stuff and in Windows you can use DirectX to do it.
If you are doing SIP for VoIP, hopefully you are using the open source stuff on vovida.org which has over 100 man years of development in it by engineers who were paid mostly by Cisco. I work for Cisco but I think they have been very good to the open source SIP community.
I'm not worried that they own the trademark that is fine. I did not say they own IPR on the protocol - I said they owned IPR on things that you will need to implement a server. If someone can point me to a document to the contrary I will stand corrected - I have asked people at Jabber this and I certainly did get the "there is no IPR answer". However, I encourage you to look carefully at this.
Cullen
I was at the Jabber BOF and it was quite interesting.
One thing is that jabber was presented as a solution not for instant messaging (IM) or presence protocol (PP) but as a solution for asynchronous transfer of XML. Another BOF, XML Conf, was suggesting there was a requirement for this sort of stuff to provision routers and such.
Most people seemed to feel that Jabber had major issues from a security and privacy point of view for doing IMPP. Remember that the IETF did look at jabber a few years ago for doing IMPP and it was rejected. Since then, many protocols have been proposed. IM can send message in "page mode" where you are just sending a one time message or it can set up a whole session between the clients for cases where you are going to transfer many message back and forth. This second mode is called session mode. Right now the SIMPLE group more or less has a good proposal for page mode and setting up sessions but is debating how to transfer messages in session mode.
I believe that the following companies have said they will support SIMPLE: Microsoft, Yahoo, Lotus, etc. Unlike what the CNET article said, I was told that AOL filed documents with the FCC saying they would do SIMPLE.
If there is a IETF WG on jabber, which I believe might happen, the interesting thing will be to read what that groups chatter is to do - I bet it won't say that it is gong to developed a complete IMPP solution.
On a side note about how this effects open source development, I work with the vovida.org project which develops voice over IP and messaging open source software. We have talked to the jabber.org and jabber.com multiple times. It's always been difficult to figure out how this all fits together from an open source point of view. You see, jabber.com has patents on stuff you need to implement jabber. At the Jabber BOF at IETF I specifically asked them if they would make this IPR available in a way that worked for open source people. They answered that people had implements this stuff and they weren't suing them. This is like yah, DUH, of course when we are trying to get people addicted to the drug we don't sue them. They have NEVER made any commitment to allow this IPR to be used in open source products. They are a desperate company looking for a way to make a business model out of jabber. If you think jabber is the best for open source - give that some careful thought.
Cullen
I am a IEEE member and I think this is bogus so not all those members are supportive of it.
To quote from the IEEE website, "The IEEE (Eye-triple-E) is a non-profit, technical professional association of more than 377,000 individual members in 150 countries". I don't think that the IEEE should even enter in this topic.
Personally, I believe this does not really represent the wishes of IEEE members but instead represents the views of a small group that runs the IEEE. As far as I can tell these are mostly older males who used to work for the US defense industry and upset their skills are no longer needed by many companies.
If you want to implement a VoIP system, there is a bunch of open source software at www.vovida.org that was put there to help make things like this happen.
<blatant ad>
There is SIP proxies and registrars, B2BUA for prepaid billing, MGCP to SIP translators, H.323 to SIP translators, voice mail system, SIP, RTSP, OSP, COPS, TRIP, RTP, RADIUS and MGCP stacks, and much more. It has been tested with phones and gateways from almost all major vendors and most of the smaller SIP vendors. It can be set up in with no single point of failure and has been tested up too 500 calls per seconds (that's a lot per day - you do the math)
</blatant ad>
There is also some good infromation at www.iptel.org
The IEEE does not pay authors - it is all academics and professionals. They do not pay editors or review boards - again all volunteer. They charge very high fees to libraries and even individuals. The online subscriptions cost almost as much as the print subscriptions.
In short they do very little for the huge amount paid to them. Why can the academic community not form a purely web based journal that is of the same academic peer review quality of the IEEE and available to all for free? Seems like this might be a good time to figure out the answer to that questions.
Coke trade marked the particular color of red they use which looks afefully close to (255,0,0) to me. Good to see no one else uses the color (255,0,0)
If Bin Laden had a nuke, I would really hope that the launch control systems was controlled by a really good OS that had been critically reviewed and worked on by lots of people - not some home grown thing cooked up in a cave.
Darpa Communicator is cool - The TTS and ASR along with AI aspects offers a huge amount that the open source community has not taken advantage of.
RTEMS (see http://www.rtems.army.mil) is a very nice real time OS that the military has open sourced with a very BSD like license that even mentions GPL (see http://www.rtems.army.mil/rg4/copyright.html)
:-)
As a side note I see that RTEMS stands for something new - perhaps I am having a 1984 experience but I seem to remember it used to stand for "Real Time Executive for Missile Systems"
Don't say the us military has not done anything for open source or I will be forced to mention Arpanet
Nearly every linux runs in a VM of sorts. The bios initialized your super weird ram bus meemory and other exotic hardware to look more or less like a real fast 486. Claming linux was not designed to run in a VM shows a prety fundemental lack of apreciation of modern computer archatectures.
This is the best response so far.
This is complete bogus - the CIELAB space was one of the few spaces that was designed to be as close to perceptually uniform as possible. It may not be perfece but is is quite good - I think you are confusing IED Lab* space with something else.
No but I suspect that's how they dealt with lost packets.
Hogwash to the lot of them.... The ideas they call packet switching were clearly being used by the Romans, the only difference was the transport involved people and horses not electrical signals but the transport if totally irrelevant to all the concepts they claim are packet switching. Odds are good it was used well before the Romans.
Santa Claus to personnaly deliver me a windows based computer that has 99.999% uptime.
We all got our wants. Reality Sucks.
Clearly 1c/page is way to expensive for much content (anyone reading this fine message for example
The issue is that it won't work from a technical point of view. No one has proposed a practical billing systems where the cost of dealing with each transaction is in the penny category. Never mind the privacy and access rules - you can bet this billing system is going to require you to enter a credit card number.
So I offer a challenge - some one come up with a reasonable secure system, that allow micro (sub 10 cent) billing, is anonymous like cash, is deployable, is available to people other than Americans over the age of 18, and costs at most 0.1 cent per billed transaction. Seriously, got an idea on how to solve this, I imagine my employer (Cisco) would seriously help make it happen. Send me some email.
PS. I would also like to use this system to charge you 5 cents to send me an email - Can you imagine how that would cut down on spam?
Many companies, including Cisco where I work, have made strong use of open source software and deployed it extensively - this is different from developing it. Make sure you deal with them separately.
All the problems that exists in traditional software development, also exists in open source plus some new ones because of communication and distributed control issues. It's not like you can easily fire an open source developer (and that is good