Friday, March 30, 2007

VOIP is used in 9% of US homes

In our coverage of voice over IP (VOIP), we saw that VOIP sales passed traditional business PBX sales in 2003. VOIP is making inroads into the home. A recent Instat report states that as of the fourth quarter 2006, more than 10.6 million US households (9%) have at least one active VoIP user. That is up from approximately 9 million households at the end of the third quarter. It seems inevitable that eventually, person-to-person voice will be just another Internet service. Do you use VOIP? If so, do you also have a traditional land-line or cellular phone?

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

An open book on open source software

MIT Press has released a free-download version of their book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. This is an excellent collection of articles by well known authors. All of them are not open source "cheerleaders." For example, one chapter examines an important Linux module, and is highly critical of the code quality.

With this book, MIT Press has followed the open publishing format of the University of Michigan Digital Culture imprint. Let's hope it works well and more publishers do the same.