Mae Kowalke, an Associate Editor at TMC.net who also blogs for them on Wireless Mobility, posted this item last week in the IP Telephony Online Community section, about VoIP Logic making its Web Services APIs available to service providers. Her article caught my attention because of this paragraph:

Further, VoIP Logic’s APIs enable a variety of ways to access and make use of information from third-party vendor subsystems from companies like Sylantro, High Deal and Iperia.

Exposing APIs as Web Services is also key to the success of IperiaVX - that’s what makes it easy for web developers to tightly couple voice with internal and third-party applications, without having to dig around in the telecom infrastructure.

(Thanks, Mae, for dropping us a nod.)

I recently ran across an application which one of our customers was thinking about implementing. Now I know this customer well and they are adamant about not pushing out open source to their network. So this so called “commercial” application had a demo which I watched.

Darn did it look familiar… So I dug a little deeper. Come to find out they had taken and re-used open source from another application for a particular feature.

Using open source is becoming more prevelant in our industry, and as a result you really need to be careful of the products you use. Ask your vendor for position statements regarding their use of open source. Make sure you understand the GPL/LGPL that is relevant.

The last thing you want is an issue where someone comes back at you for liability due to intellectual property.

So watch out!